Yesterday, was the first day of the MGM vs. Grokster trial. MGM has launched an appeal of an earlier court decision that the creators of filesharing network Grokster were not legally responsible for any software or music (or presumably since it’s MGM legal dept’s dollar) movie piracy carried out on the Grokster network. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is casting this in apocalyptic terms. According to them, the future of the internet is on trial: if the people who provide the network are legally liable for the actions of it’s users, then taken to the extreme anyone who builds or codes the internet could be sued for anyone who uses it to do anything wrong. Maybe they’re right to be that concerned, I’m not sure. Mostly I just beleive in the long term good file sharing can inflict on the music industry via some short term unpleasantness. Such as maybe getting rid of the industry part. So I’d like to see file sharing networks survive. Anyhow

I’m not sure exactly who or why decided to record the opening arguments in the case, but they did and they’ve converted them to MP3 and it’s available from the EFF website.

It’s interesting stuff, a chance to listen in on a real courtroom trial regarding a relativley technical issue. I’ve always wondered how judges dealt with this geeky stuff and here it is. Since it’s just the opening arguments it’s the relativley dramatic summary part, not too too boring. And the MGM lawyer opens with a joke (judge: is grokster the proper pronunciation by the way? lawyer: I think so. I have some other names for it. Courtroom: laughter).

What’s particularly interesting is that the judges are just hammering this MGM guy. By my count he gets exactly 45 seconds into his spiel before Judge Noonan jumps down his throat with the Sony Betamax issue. I only hope this doesn’t end up being another Judge Jackson scenario.

When I downloaded the file it was going slowly, when I tried to access another EFF page they were offline, so it’s possible their server has crashed under the demand for the file (oops). If you want to give it a listen you could probably find it by, say, searching on Kazaa.