Court disallows brief in trial against Harvard student who downloaded music

One of the three amicus briefs filed in support of Webcasting the proceedings in the trial of a Harvard student accusing of illegally downloading music has been refused for consideration by the First Circuit Court.

The Associated Press-led brief was rejected because accepting it would have required that one of the judges involved recuse herself or himself from the case. That would indicate that one or more of the judges has a conflict of interest with one of the parties petitioning; perhaps they hold stock in a certain company, or have a close relative employed by one. (In other words, the "friend of the court" in this case is some entity with whom someone on the court really is friendly.)

The petitioners on the AP brief were Courtroom Television Network, Dow Jones & Co., Gannett, Hearst Corporation, Incisive, National Public Radio, NBC Universal, the New York Times, the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Scripps, the Tribune Company and Washington Post Digital.

The other two amicus briefs were filed by Courtroom View Network (yes, a separate brief) and by a group of media and public-interest groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive. CVN has confirmed to Betanews that their brief (PDF available here) has been accepted for filing and is before the court, which still needs to read and consider whether it'll admit the actual information. The EFF's brief has likewise been accepted and will be read.

Other signatories to the EFF's brief (PDF available here) are PublicResource.org, the Media Access Project, the Internet Archive, Free Press, the California First Amendment Coalition, and LA-based journalist Ben Shaffner.

That brief, by the way, doesn't only represent organziations one might expect to side with Joel Tenenbaum's defense. Sheffner, who writes the Copyrights & Campaigns blog, is supportive of the plaintiffs' view, and wants the proceedings webcast so he can report remotely on the trial without the proceedings being filtered by other media outlets, which he believes are generally anti-RIAA.