The COPs (Copyright Owner Plaintiffs) in the ReplayTV case have asked the judge to have the EFF's lawyers barred from seeing a stunning 78% of the documents in the case. The justification? That the EFF is a "competitor" of the studios and shouldn't be allowed to see their trade secrets.
The Joint Stipulation (including both the COPs' motion for restriction and the EFF's reply) contains some unintentionally hilarious accusations. For example, on page 11, the EFF is described as "beyond the extreme end of the spectrum in its policy positions." Apparently, the EFF has negative wavelength. The request also states that:
Were these EFF lawyers to gain access through this litigation to "Highly Restricted" information about, for example, Plaintiff MGM's business plan for maximizing revenues from DVD distribution, or Plaintiff Time Warner's analysis of the technical weaknesses of a proposed content security system, that information would inform all of their future lobbying work for EFF.
Sounds good to LawMeme.
All joking aside, Hollywood is trying to shut down the EFF's political work in a pretty underhanded way. What if Thurgood Marshall had been kept off of Brown v. Board of Ed. because the NAACP was a "competitor" of segregationists? Even for the Mouse, this is a pretty low blow.