Charles Nesson, the defense attorney in the case of Sony v. Tenenbaum, the second ever P2P civil trial, is possibly the most entertaining lawyer of all time. First he started asking potential jurors about turtlenecks, then he got bizarrely existential and now he’s asking for a re-trial, saying piracy is the music industry’s fault… for letting it be so damn easy.
I’m hoping he’s just trying to keep the case alive/get more press, because otherwise he’s completely insane. His argument is basically identical to the whole “she was asking to get raped with that oufit” thing. From Ars Technica:
“Plaintiffs, in August 2004, could reasonably be considered to have been at least partially responsible for the widespread dispersion of their recordings over peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Kazaa,” writes Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, Tenenbaum’s lawyer.
“Their continued conduct of releasing their recordings into a digitally networked environment on DRM-free CDs made the proliferation of their recordings on the peer-to-peer networks trivially easy. Their aggressive promotion of their recordings made such proliferation entirely predictable. Indeed, their mode of publication all but invited sharing. Plaintiffs knew, or should have known, exactly where their sound recordings would end up.”
It’s been an awesome week in bizarre music news.
