While a federal judge lets twitter coverage into the courtroom, webcams in 1st Circuit RIAA hearing remain uncertain.

The ABA Journal post, Another Federal Judge Allows Twitter Coverage of Trial, discusses the use of twitter media coverage in a federal case involving six accused gang members. Note, the journalist, not the gang members, was using twitter. Are we seeing the start of a courtroom coverage trend? In January, I posted about a federal judge allowing blog coverage of a trial. While reports of this type appear to be growing, courtroom coverage through new technology is not well received everywhere

In my prior post, I mentioned a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) case brought against Joel Tenebaum, a Boston University graduate student (involving alleged illegal music downloading from the internet.) In this case, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner granted a motion to allow video streaming coverage of the hearing via a webcam. RIAA argued against this and Judge Gertner evenhandedly postponed the hearing to allow an appeal. The hearing, originally postponed until Feb. 24, 2009, has now been postponed even further.

Jaikumar Vijayan, in an informative post, New Hurdle for video streaming order in RIAA piracy case, writes:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued an order on Feb. 20 asking both sides in the case to provide their legal comments on a 1996 ban on the use of cameras in the circuit's court rooms.

The appeals court has given Tenenbaum and the music labels 20 days from the order to file the comments, or supplementary briefs, on the likely implications of the 1996 resolution on the present case.

In a separate development, a scheduled hearing of the case Tuesday in a federal district court in Boston, at which the live streaming was to have occurred, has been pushed back to April 30.

I applaud Justice Gertner for her ruling and I hope her decision is upheld. If so, I think it will be interesting to see what people tweet about on twitter while watching the streaming video coverage of an alleged illegal music downloading case. If you think about that idea for a minute, does anyone doubt the web isn't changing things dramatically?

Follow me on twitter.