Bloomberg: Microsoft Says Apple Used Bing as Google ‘Bargaining Chip’. “A Microsoft Corp. executive complained that when it came to the search-engine wars with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, the company’s Bing was never more than a bargaining chip to Apple Inc.”
WIRED: Meet the Law Geeks Exposing Google’s Secretive Antitrust Trial. “MONTHS OUT OF law school, Yosef Weitzman already has a huge courtroom role in the biggest antitrust trial of the century. In a US federal trial that started last week, Google is accused of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. The company’s self-defined mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible, yet Google successfully opposed live streaming the trial and keeping the proceedings wholly open to the public. Enter Weitzman.”
NPR: Here’s what’s at stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla tweet trial. “In 2018, before Elon Musk was making headlines for his role in running Twitter, he was making headlines for another Twitter-related controversy: allegedly using the platform to commit fraud…. Now, a civil trial stemming from those tweets is being watched as a window into Musk’s behavior, past and present, which means the trial could produce new controversies of its own.”
BuzzFeed News: The YouTube Channel Streaming Alex Jones’s Trial Disabled The Chat Because Of Threats To Sandy Hook Victims’ Families. “The trial, which is being livestreamed in its entirety on YouTube by the Law & Crime channel, has had thousands of viewers each day since it began last week, although Jones himself has yet to testify. As always on Law & Crime’s streams, there are hundreds of active and colorful commenters, but trial viewers and Twitter users had noted from day one that the chat was littered with the same conspiracy theories that Jones now faces paying damages for.”
NPR: To try or not to try — remotely. As jury trials move online, courts see pros and cons. “NPR talked to nearly two dozen judges, attorneys and jurors who have participated in online jury trials to see how things are going. After nearly 18 months, some evidence is in but the verdict is still out. Some fears were realized, but there were unexpected benefits as well, including higher participation rate among people called to serve.”
Orange County Register: Coronavirus: Woman who refused to wear mask in Costa Mesa grocery store goes on trial. “A jury will soon decide whether Marianne Campbell Smith is guilty of a pair of misdemeanor charges, including trespassing and obstructing a business or customers, for allegedly refusing to leave busy Mother’s Market near the Triangle Square during an anti-mask protest on Aug. 15, 2020.”
Stanford University: Stanford scholars expand digital database with historic records from the Nuremberg Trial. “This additional collection, to be known as the Tad Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, will allow the public to easily browse and discover the contents of over 5,000 trial records – including 250,000 pages of digitized paper documents – showing in meticulous detail the efforts of the IMT, a group of representatives from four Allied countries – the U.S., the U.K., the Soviet Union and France – who were tasked with prosecuting former officials of the Third Reich and holding them accountable for the horrific acts inflicted during World War II and the Holocaust.” The new collection launches tomorrow, October 1.
Mashable: Jurors could use VR to visit crime scenes, and help them reach a verdict. “In a paper published this May, researchers from the University of South Australia investigated whether the ability to inspect crime scenes in virtual reality could help jurors make decisions in courtroom trials. Measuring the impact of viewing the same crime scene in either VR or a photographic slideshow, they found that virtual reality led participants to a different, more consistent verdict than one based only on photos.”
From November. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: For 75th Anniversary of Nuremberg Trials, Museum Makes Available War Crimes Trial Recordings, Film. “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has made available online the full sound recordings of the War Crimes Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) established in Nuremberg, Germany, commonly referred to as the Nuremberg Trials. Additionally, the film evidence presented by the World War II Allied prosecutors at the trial is now available for online viewing. The collection consists of 1,942 gramophone discs holding 775 hours of hearings and 37 reels of film used as evidence in the trials.”
Balkan Transitional Justice: Burden of Proof: Inside Bosnia’s War Trial Case Archives. “Bosnia’s state court is rapidly running out of space for its ever-growing multitude of documents and evidence from war crimes trials, while the lack of an online archive is hampering lawyers and impeding public access to information.”
ABC News: Social distanced justice? Courts restart trials, struggle to adapt to COVID-19 precautions. “As courts across the country begin to cautiously resume in-person hearings through the COVID-19 pandemic, judges are confronting a vexing challenge: how to safely convene jury trials at a time when health officials continue to caution against public gatherings.”
New York University: Research to Use Innovative Data Science Tools to Study Pretrial Detention in More than 1,000 U.S. Counties. “A team of researchers from NYU’s Public Safety Lab will use data science techniques to study the impacts of pretrial detention in more than 1,000 U.S. counties—including many rural counties that have remained largely unstudied.”
New York Times: A Trial and a Twitterstorm: On Live-Tweeting From a Federal Courthouse. “As I walked into a federal court in Dallas last Tuesday, waiting to hear the Facebook founder’s testimony, my pockets were filled with the items typical of a paranoid tech reporter on deadline: a laptop, my iPhone, spare batteries, charging cables, backup charging cables, a digital voice recorder, seven different ink pens and at least four of my favorite notebooks. I would broadcast his words to the world as quickly as I could, or watch my laptop die trying. Here is what I was not prepared for: A stern, six-foot tall retired United States Marshal, built like a brick house and with little time for pleasantries, telling me he’d kick me out of the courthouse if I sent one more tweet about the trial.”
A number of initiatives are making China’s judicial system more transparent. “… on Sept. 27, Zhou Qiang, the chief justice of China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and head of the country’s judiciary, announced the debut of an impressive new website, the Chinese Open Trial Network. It already boasts full, high-definition videos of over 67,000 criminal, administrative, and civil proceedings.” And there’s a lot more to come.
If you’re on a jury in California, resist the temptation to Google the case. “California lawmakers are considering fines of as much of $1,500 for jurors who tweet about trials or research a case on Google, after court officials argued that misbehaving citizens have caused mistrials and overturned convictions around the country.”
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