Tilting at Internet Barrier, a Stalwart Is Upended

A look at Professor Charles Nesson, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. He took on the recording industry in an eagerly anticipated civil case here over sharing music online. But he stumbled. On July 31, a jury handed down an eye-popping $675,000 judgment against Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was defended by Prof Nesson. Tenenbaum's offense was downloading and sharing 30 songs. It was a stinging defeat for Professor Nesson, and to many in the legal community, it seemed to be a moment when an eccentric scholar's devotion to a soaring vision blinded him to the practical realities of winning a legal case. Taking on a lawsuit that his own allies warned was ill-advised, Professor Nesson acted in ways that many observers found bizarre and even harmful to the case. But in an interview, Professor Nesson sounded a nearly evangelical tone, saying the case presented an opportunity to take on the recording industry's "assault on what I think of as the digital-native generation" over the industry's own failure to adapt to changing technologies. While artists deserve to be paid, he said, the solution is not to threaten and punish those who love music through a copyright regime that "produces absurd results."