PiracyWatch: Harvard Law School Gets Behind Accused Pirate

By Eriq Gardner

A classroom project seems to percolated into a bit of a litigious headache for record companies.

Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School has organized his cyberlaw class to defend 24-year-old grad student Joel Tenenbaum, accused of downloading and making songs available over the peer-to-peer file sharing system Kazaa. The witness list is a who's who of cyberlaw thinkers, including Lawrence Lessig, John Perry Barlow, Johan Pouwelse, Jonathan Zittrain, Wendy Seltzer, Terry Fisher, John Palfrey, and others.

The case is expected to examine the constitutionality of laws that let copyright holders enforce criminal statue by way of civil suits.

The recording industry has recently filed motions in this case and others to allow it more time to prepare.