Joel Tenenbaum, the second P2P defendant to take his case to trial in the US, may never pay the $675,000 judgment currently filed against him—but someone on his legal team will soon be paying something. Judge Nancy Gertner has ruled that both Tenenbaum and his lawyer, Harvard Law's Charles Nesson, are "jointly and severally liable" for some fees incurred by the RIAA during the trial. The ruling comes after the defense team inexplicably posted the very songs at issue in the case to the Internet, and Nesson posted a public link on his blog for anyone to download them.

This behavior prompted a discovery request from the record labels, which wanted to know more about why the defense was now doing the very thing it had been accused of doing in the lawsuit. Nesson didn't want to tell them. The labels then filed a "motion to compel" the information.The judge sums it all up:

[Nesson's] terse response to plaintiffs' motion to compel merely stated that, in his personal opinion, the plaintiffs' requests were not relevant to this litigation. As indicated in this Court's June 16, 2009, order, plaintiffs' request for information relating to the defense's unauthorized distribution of the very copyrighted works on which plaintiffs' claims were based was clearly relevant to such issues as the willfulness of the defendant's conduct and the amount of damages to be awarded by the jury.

Lawyers who win a "motion to compel" are entitled to have their costs for that particular motion reimbursed; it's a way to keep opposing lawyers from dragging their feet on discovery requests with no good reason. The labels have asked that these fees be paid by the defense, and Gertner on Tuesday agreed.

On June 18, 2009, the judge made clear her displeasure with Nesson's behavior in the case, so this week's ruling isn't a surprise.

The Court's indulgence is at an end. Too often, as described below, the important issues in this case have been overshadowed by the tactics of defense counsel: taping opposing counsel without permission (and in violation of the law), posting recordings of court communications and e-mails with potential experts (who have rejected the positions counsel asserts) on the Internet, and now allegedly replicating the acts that are the subject of this lawsuit, namely uploading the copyrighted songs that the Defendant is accused of file-sharing.

It also didn't help that Nesson filed no response to the record label motion against him. The labels have until March 8 to file with the court "an affidavit containing an itemized statement of the expenses they incurred in filing the motion to compel." Nesson, who took on the Tenenbaum case pro bono, may now being paying out of his own pocket for the privilege of defending Tenenbaum.