But relying on a jury to make that decision is beyond risky. Look what happened to Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Found liable once for around $9,000 per song, she appealed, was declared guilty again, and is now on the hook for . She's got .

The jury selection process in the Tenenbaum case was "tortured" by even the judge's standards. The record companies did their job, weeding out jurors who might be sympathetic to file-swapping college students and/or know much about tech. Nesson, by contrast, wanted to know (apparently he's a big Steve Jobs fan) or his admission to smoking marijuana in the past. No, I'm not making that up. (Though I suspect that "by the past," he meant "in the past five minutes, in the bathroom down the hall.")

Writing all this, I'm starting to wonder if Nesson is actually licensed to practice law or just a wacky impersonator, like Leonardo DiCaprio in "Catch Me If You Can." It's certainly entertaining from the perspective of someone who isn't on the hook for $4.5 million, but I have to wonder how Team Tenenbaum feels about all this.

As I've said too many times before, . It has shifted from its original intent -- allowing content creators a fair return for their intellectual endeavors -- and moved into the field of revenue assurance for copyright holders, who are usually not the people who created the content in the first place. If the Tenenbaum trial doesn't change this (and it sure doesn't look likely at this point), something else must.

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