Judge Nancy Gertner: Electronic ORDER entered with respect to Rule 50 motion: The Court will make required findings concerning copyright ownership, but leave all remaining issues -- infringement (reproduction and distribution), damages and willfulness -- for the jury, out of an abundance of caution. The Court does so in part because the statutory damages inquiry obliges the jury to consider some of the same issues as the infringement inquiry, i.e. the nature of the infringement. (Gertner, Nancy)In other words, the jury will still decide the basic issue of whether Tenenbaum infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights (which he admitted today under oath), and whether he infringed willfully, which means infringed "with knowledge of or 'reckless disregard' for the plaintiffs' copyrights." The jury will not have to decide copyright ownership (one of the two basic elements of an infringement claim); Tenenbaum doesn't dispute it.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Court leaves decisions on infringement and willfulness to jury; grants Rule 50 motion on copyright ownership
Late today Judge Gertner issued the following ruling on the plaintiffs' motion for a directed verdict under Rule 50:
1 comment:
Comments here are moderated. I appreciate substantive comments, whether or not they agree with what I've written. Stay on topic, and be civil. Comments that contain name-calling, personal attacks, or the like will be rejected. If you want to rant about how evil the RIAA and MPAA are, and how entertainment companies' employees and attorneys are bad people, there are plenty of other places for you to go.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Dear Ben,
ReplyDeleteI have never been so disgusted in my 68 year long life. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are assisting in the destruction of a child's future. And you applaud this massacre, for what reason? Because he acted like millions of other kids his age? Ben, are you a religious man? Spiritual at all? Do you see any value in life outside of money, ownership, and power? Because if you have any sympathy whatsoever, if you have any capacity to feel emotion for another human being, you will see this case for what it really is: a group of greedy old men, seeing their fortune wittle away, and reeking vengeance on an unsuspecting victim for the crimes of his generation. This is not about paying artists their due. This is about bankrupting a child for the technology that is uprooting some CEO's pocket book. And you sit at your computer, type away, and applaud this witch-hunt. You come across as a spoiled, cold-hearted, and unsympathetic lawyer, and I pity whomever chooses to love you.
-Jeff