Monday, January 26, 2009

Jammie Thomas asks Court for extension to retain expert witness, received $3000 grant from Free Software Foundation

In Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is scheduled for its second trial to take place on March 9th, the verdict from the first trial having been set aside, the defendant has received a grant of $3000 from the Expert Witness Defense Fund of the Free Software Foundation to enable her to retain an expert witness.

In the first trial, she could not afford an expert witness to rebut the expert witness used by the RIAA.

Accordingly, her attorney has made a motion for an extension of the discovery deadline.

This is the second case in which the FSF's Expert Witness Defense Fund has lent assistance, the first being UMG Recordings v. Lindor, where it granted $2046.92 to compensate the expert witness and $750.00 to compensate the technical consultant. A full report of the Expert Witness Defense Fund's receipts and disbursements as of December 31, 2008, is available here.

Memorandum in Support of Motion for Extension of Discovery Deadline

[Ed. Note. Tax deductible contributions can be made to the Free Software Foundation, specifically earmarked for the RIAA Expert Witness Defense Fund, which funds are used to help the victims of RIAA lawsuits to hire technical experts and/or consultants, here.]


Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net
y-net (Hebrew)




Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

5 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

Well, I appreciate your mentioning of the link, just too bad it isn't useful (yet!) for me :-( *

But I keep it in mind for wednesday evening :-)

*
http://lotto.de/presse_detail_299.html

Anonymous said...

What will the expert witness do for her? I'd be much more interested to see MediaSentry employees or Oppenheim on the stand. But surely I'm overlooking many important issues?

And of course her strongest defense is the reason the case was thrown out before -- making available isn't infringment. Is the expert witness's testimony going to in some way connect with this issue?

Teddy Bear

raybeckerman said...

Dear Teddy Bear, your comment betrays a lack of familiarity with the first trial. The transcript is online. Read it. Then come back with a more meaningful comment.

Anonymous said...

Will do.

Teddy Bear

Anonymous said...

Ray - Alter Fritz was trying to let you know that the link to the pdf is broken.