I’ve previously written already about how the RIAA has stunned me by actually providing reasonable arguments to defend their case against one particular alleged filesharer, Jammie Thomas. I also commented on how Thomas’ lawyer, Kiwi Camara, was kind of a dick. Well, he’s doing it again:

Basically, during the first trial, there was the formality of the RIAA actually proving that they own the copyright to the songs which were allegedly downloaded. So the RIAA’s lawyer (Matt Oppenheim seems to be the “leader” of the five lawyers RIAA had hired for this case) brought in some documents showing that they, yes, they owned the copyright, and the trial went on, and eventually ended (with the jurors siding with the RIAA, for what it’s worth). Then there was a retrial, and during the pretrial of this retrial, Camara challenged the documents the RIAA had provided earlier, saying they were copies instead of the original (the exact wording was that the RIAA had provided “true and correct” copies, instead of “certified” copies). The Oppenheim and company said this is silly, but the judge said that on this particular technicality, Camara is right, and so the RIAA went back to the office to try and get “certified copies”. Ominously, the Oppenheim said that it may be “difficult” to acquire these certified copies, leading some to believe that perhaps there was some sort of secret conspiracy, and that the RIAA did not actually own the copyrights to these songs, and their whole case was about to collapse.

Well, it turns out that nothing so dramatic has happened. Instead, the RIAA got the “certified” copies, mockingly adding “Now we have them on the fancy paper the Copyright Office provides.” Camara’s response? He motioned to have these new documents barred, because neither the defense nor the prosecution should be allowed to submit new evidence this late into the pretrial. That was kind of an asshole thing to do, IMHO: asking someone to provide new copies of the document, and then arguing that no new documents are allowed to be provided. Anyway, Oppenheim argues that the “new” documents are identical to the documents that the RIAA had submitted years ago; simply printed on new (fancy) paper. We’ll see what the judge decides, but I hope and and optimistically confident that he will side with Oppenheim on this one. The judge seems like a very reasonable person, and I think it’s pretty settled that Camara has no case in his objection to these documents now.

As an aside, this judge also seems quite “hip” and “with-it”:

The judge then gave some instructions. Jurors were not to blog during the trial. They were not to put anything “on your Facebook.” And under no circumstances were they to “tweet”—an expression that clearly pleased the judge, who used it three or four times.

If I could get in a time machine, go back 2 to 5 years, and tell my pass self that I’d be rooting for the RIAA, or that juries would receive instructions not to use Twitter or Facebook, I wonder if I would believe myself.