Now certainly sufficiently capable legal teams already include quite a bit of resources targetted at looking good in court.

Would it make even worse to have it on video?

You’d have to try to let the adversarial sides have as LITTLE influence on the cinematography and editing as possible.

But now we’ve got motions about how the lighting was unfairly unfavorable to one client, or favorable to another. Or how the guy behind the camera is obviously biased in the way he frames the shots.

But….

(1) It removes the ability of jurors to ask for clarification if a witness’s voice (or the recording of it) isn’t crystal clear. More importantly to me — as much of my “jury trial” experience involves courts martial and military administrative hearings — it removes the possibility for the jurors to themselves ask questions. I know that a lot of lawyers think that’s a bad idea; I don’t, because it enables the jury to reach a greater comfort zone of truth. (Too many lawyers, particularly in criminal proceedings, forget that the object of contested trial in particular is to reach truth, and only secondarily to “win”.)

(2) It’s going to be hellaciously complicated to adapt this to the hearing or visually impaired (who have the right to sit on a jury, too).

(3) Worst of all, it’s going to encourage more second-guessing of the evidence in appeals. That DVD is going to become the principal component of the record on appeal… and appellate judges are going to find it hard to resist the opportunity to sit as jurors, because they’ll have in front of them exactly what the jurors saw. Thus, appeals of jury verdicts will edge ever closer to the model for appeals of summary judgment motions, no matter how high-minded the rhetoric that will come from the courts of appeals. This will be a particular problem when a verdict appears to rest upon credibility of witnesses.

In the DVD model, a talented director could do wonders for whichever side hired her. It would put jury selection consultancy out of business, and do wonders for down-and-out film school grads.

Given that the are asked to make the payment decision at the beginning of the semester, before they’ve used it, I’m not sure if that’s exactly what is going on.

ReDigi would blow those practical limits away, disrupting the first sale balance in the direction of too little control for copyright owners.

On the other hand, the reality of the situation is that copyright owners have already lost the degree of control which they had before the digital era. The results of a recent survey of Americans’ position on various forms of copyright infringement and media behavior lead me to suspect, even if I cannot know because that particular question was not addressed, that a strong majority of Americans under the age of 29 would not consider it wrong to illegally obtain material under copyright which they had already paid for, once, but which afterwards had been accidentally deleted.

Both views are correct — which is to say, that to the extent that the Copyright Act distinguishes a “program” from any other information stored in a computer, it rests on a distinction that collapses if you push too hard on it.

We could think of an MP3 as a bunch of “data” that is used as an input to a music player. Or we could think of the MP3 as a “program” that, when run correctly, produces sound as an output. Both views are correct — which is to say, that to the extent that the Copyright Act distinguishes a “program” from any other information stored in a computer, it rests on a distinction that collapses if you push too hard on it.

Nicely put.
Thou rather than blowing ‘smoke’ , might they be said to be blowing quantum cats?

I would say, even though I’m sympathetic to ReDigi, the argument fails on the use of section 117 in context, NOT program vs. data. That is, even if it was “it’s not an infringement to make a copy of a “computer program/data” as “an essential step in the utilization of the computer program/data”, it still wouldn’t work. That is, section 117 is about the USING of program/data in terms of performing its function - e.g. loading into memory. The program/data files sitting on servers aren’t being used for anything.

Note the full text is (emphasis added)

that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner

Moreover, section 117 specifically applies to “owner of a copy”, and there’s some decisions saying most software buyers are licensees, not owners, hence no section 117.

http://iplaw.hllaw.com/2010/09/articles/copyright/ninth-circuit-addresses-owner-vs-licensee-determination-in-applying-first-sale-doctrine/

I thought the laws regarding model releases effectively cover people moving (videos). Am I wrong?