The case of Joel Tenenbaum v. RIAA has, since the beginning, felt a bit like a Hollywood movie script. It may be a few years before the story finds its way to the big screen. (It may be years before it’s out of litigation….) But thanks to the recent ruling by trial judge Nancy Gertner, the story is now coming to a small screen near you.

Boston University student Tenenbaum was sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement in 2003, and after his first settlement offer was rejected, Joel fought back, filing a pro se counterclaim asserting “abuse of federal power” and that the “excessive damages” sought by the RIAA are unconstitutional.

Joel’s home-grown defense soon attracted the attention of Charles Nesson, Harvard law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Nesson has made clear that he’s not an enemy of copyright law, but he and many of his colleagues believe that the basis for the RIAA suits — the “Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999″ — is unconstitutional.

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

(The RIAA has aggressively pursued students at Columbia University, Duke University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Princeton, and Brown University — but not Harvard — possibly to avoid picking a fight with Nesson.)

Nesson brought the fight to them, when in 2008, he decided not only to head up Tenenbaum’s defense, but also turn it into an ongoing class project: he is being assisted by several of his students at Harvard Law.

The RIAA has long maintained that their practice of suing individuals is aimed at “education,” to deter the wider public from engaging in file sharing activities. So, in the spirit of education, Nesson asked the judge to broadcast the trial live over webcams — and she agreed:

In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet Generation — the generation that has grown up with computer technology in general, and the Internet in particular, as commonplace. . . . It is reportedly a generation that does not read newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information largely, if almost exclusively, over the Internet. . . .

The hearing is currently scheduled for March 2009.

The RIAA recently decided to stop their practice of suing individuals, but they are continuing with the cases that are currently in litigation — most notably, the Tenenbaum case.