Free for a Fee

There will be no fair use defense for Joel Tenenbaum at trial this week.

Everything about the Tenenbaum case has been highly unusual, and Judge Nancy Gernter’s final pretrial order was no exception. Tenenbaum goes on trial in Boston today at 9:00am for sharing 30 songs on KaZaA, but the judge did not make a ruling on the fair use issue until early this morning. And what a ruling it was.

Tenenbaum has essentially admitted to the accusations during his depositions, and recording industry investigators have the hard drives from his computers. These two facts alone make the case materially different from the first US file-sharing trial, the case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset in Minnesota, where Thomas-Rasset claimed she didn’t share the files in question and said that the hard drive in use at the time had been destroyed.

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