MinnLawyer Blog

This post about the recording industry’s file-sharing trial against Jammie Thomas-Rasset now underway in U.S. District Court in front of Chief Judge Michael Davis will not refer to defense attorney Kiwi Camara as a hotshot and will not refer to the trial, the second in this case, as a replay.

That said, Camara, who turns 25 years old today and graduated from Harvard Law School five years ago (you do the math) is giving the plaintiffs a run for their money although not entirely successfully so far. As you recall, the trial involves the alleged downloading of 24 songs using Kazaa software, amounting to copyright infringement. Camara didn’t get the birthday present he wanted from Davis, which was a ruling that the plaintiffs could not prove up their infringement claim without introducing into evidence the deposit copies of the music that were filed with the copyright. He lost, but only after the parties had to brief the issue by midnight last night and argue it at 8 a.m. Among the exhibits at the argument was an e-mail sent last night at 11:40 by David Carson, general counsel to the U.S. Copyright Office, saying that deposit copies of recordings are likely, but not always, available at the Library of Congress. Davis denied the motion after asking, “What is the next step? If we get the copy here, do we have to have experts say [they match the downloads]?” (No, was Camara’s answer—that’s the province of the jury.) But the SKU number on the copyright registration matched the SKU number on the commercial CDs of the songs that were downloaded, which Camara conceded was “excellent extrinsic evidence.”

Camara has also lost his attempt to suppress the evidence that MediaSentry illegally obtained evidence from the defendant’s Kazaa account. He argued that MediaSentry was not licensed as a private investigator in Minnesota and ran an illegal pen registry.

The recording industry has brought more than 30,000 lawsuits against file sharers but this is the only one to go to trial. It is expected to take five or six days to try over a two-week period.

Camara came on to the case last month after Minneapolis attorney Brian Toder withdrew, citing $130,000 in unpaid legal fees. The bottom line of his defense is “Jammie didn’t do it.” Camara said in his opening statement, “They have lots of evidence that it happened but no witness to say she did it.”