Aimster Appeal Oral Arguments
Aimster Appeal Oral Arguments
June 03, 2003
Gone to Chicago for the Aimster Appeal. Hope to see you there! UPDATE: I'm back! Here are the details! ...
The Oral Argument in Chicago:
Judges Ripple, Posner, and Williams.
Thanks to all those who came! And also to those who were there and blogged about it: Recording Industry v. Deep, John (The Aimster Case) (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog), Big City Blinking - Aimster Has Day in Court, and GrepLaw | [UPDATED!] Aimster Oral Arguments Commence - [comment by anonymous coward] - and to Copyfight: the Politics of IP/ Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
Thanks also to WrenBlog: EFF's Aimster Amicus Wrap & Review for mirroring the mp3 of the argument -- and to Derek for A Copyfighter's Musings. Also, to Howard Bashman for several nice posts.
And of course, to Professor Lessig, whose prediction that "this should be very interesting" turned out to be so true.
You really should hear it for yourself, with this MP3 from the court.
Some of the bloggers have mentioned that the judges asked our Attorney, Will Montague, questions about how the technology worked. And that Will was not able to give a complete answer.
Well, here's why:
The rule is that Will is supposed to answer the Judges' questions based ONLY on the evidence that was submitted in the lower Court.
But the problem was, there was no evidence of how the technology worked that was ever allowed in the lower Court.
Nothing except for one short declaration - which takes less than 5 minutes to read out loud.
There was no trial, no testimony, nothing.
We asked for the chance to put more evidence in, but the lower Court said no.
Other new technology cases similar to ours have always had much more evidence ... either a full trial, like in Sony, or mountains of evidence - as in Napster and Grokster.
For this reason alone, our case is an especially dangerous precedent, because it shut down an entirely new technology by an injunction and denied us the chance to present any evidence of how the technology worked.
Will Montague didn't represent us in the lower Court, and he couldn't help that the lower Court denied us the chance to present any evidence. Will only came to the case after the appeal started.
Even under such difficult circumstances, Will didn't speculate or exaggerate. Instead, he did the best he could to answer the questions about the technology truthfully, based only on the evidence.
Honest and brave, helping us when we really needed help the most ... Will, thanks so much! Without you, this appeal would never have been heard at all.
