RIAA Hearings For the First Time Live

As you know, copyright advocates from the RIAA are conducting thousands of lawsuits against ordinary users who download music and movies from the Internet. The process of searching for such users, calculating the “damage” and filing suits is streamlined and automated. We know about how the punitive machine works by trapping users. But how do court proceedings take place? No one except the participants of this action saw this with their own eyes. Now we have this opportunity.

For the first time in history, the court hearing on the claim to the RIAA will be broadcast live. The decision was made by a judge of the Boston District Court at the request of the defense, whose interests are represented by Charles Nesson, a Harvard law professor, and a group of his law students (indeed, here the RIAA was not lucky with the enemy in court).

The live broadcast will take place on January 22 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society . The filming is organized by a full-time court brigade of the Courtroom View Network (“CVN”), that is, video files can be freely distributed and used for non-commercial purposes, including being shown on television. True, the judge allowed to transmit only the legal arguments of the parties (hearings on the counterclaim of the defense to the RIAA), and not the whole process from beginning to end.
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It's funny that the representatives of the RIAA resisted the broadcast of the court hearings. In his decision ( PDF, 11 pages ), the judge emphasized this strange, in his opinion, fact.