Best Request for Admission of All Time

From the record label plaintiffs' written discovery regarding Joel Tenenbaum's fair use defense:

Admit that the image attached hereto as Exhibit 1, with the caption, 'Destroy Capitalism, Support Piracy,' is a true and correct copy of an image that was posted to the Internet by your counsel.

Exhibit 1:


Also in Tenenbaum-land, the defendant has filed a motion to compel responses to interrogatories regarding the revenues derived from the plaintiffs' copyrights. The plaintiffs had refused to respond substantively on the grounds that the interrogatories were untimely, as well as overbroad and burdensome. Interestingly, as for each interrogatory, Tenenbaum writes, "Defendant Tenenbaum requests that the plaintiffs be compelled to respond to this interrogatory in a manner they consider fair" (my emphasis). Some loophole! [UPDATE: Judge Gertner has set a hearing on this motion for Monday at 9:30 a.m. Also, a friend emails me that the labels' position is entirely correct; the case law (which I have not read myself) says that where there is a discovery cut-off, the propounding party must serve discovery in time to give his opponents the full 30 days to respond. See Edberg v. CPI, Inc., 2000 WL 1844651, *2 (D.Conn. 2000); Bailey v. Komatsu Forklift U.S.A., Inc., 2008 WL 2674886, *3 (N.D.Iowa 2008) ("parties seeking discovery [must] file their requests sufficiently in advance of the deadline, such that the responses are due by the deadline for completion of discovery"); Smith v. Principal Cas. Ins. Co., 131 F.R.D. 104, 105 (S.D.Miss. 1990).]

Lastly, Tenenbaum has filed a motion to suppress all evidence collected by MediaSentry, the firm retained by plaintiffs to identify p2p infringers, citing the Massachusetts Private Detectives Act, Mass. Gen. Law Ch. 147 § 22 et seq.; the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 U.S.C. § 2510 et seq.; and the Massachusetts Wiretapping Statute, M.G.L. 272 § 99:

In orchestrating this campaign, built around illegally obtained evidence and targeted at individuals, most of whom faced millions of dollars of potential liability without the assistance of counsel, these lawyers violated the ethical rules governing our profession on an unprecedented scale. We respectfully request that this Court remedy this ethical violation by suppressing all MediaSentry evidence in this case. In the first recording-industry prosecution to go to trial, the jury returned a verdict of $1.92M, or $80,000 per song for 24 songs. We submit that, with stakes this high, the federal courts should make clear to the world that the kind of gross abuse of federal process that we have seen in the last seven years will never again be permitted.

On June 11, Minnesota federal judge Michael Davis denied a very similar motion by Jammie Thomas-Rasset. The irony of Tenenbaum's counsel complaining of a violation of Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 272, Section 99, is staggering.