The magic cutoff for showing up for the Grokster case seems to have been around 10:00pm the night before the argument. George Mason student Eion Murdock reports showing up at 3 am and missing getting in by about a dozen spots; he reports that he was one of the 25 line-waiters who got to see the Brand X argument, but that he missed Grokster. Eion writes: “Not exactly what I was hoping for, but I figured that having stood in line for over 8 hours by that point I needed to see something.”
CDT policy analyst Mike Steffen writes that he showed up around 8pm on Monday night, and that he thought it was worth waiting in line (for 14 hours!) to see the argument. A slightly-edited excerpt from Mike’s report:
There were a lot of interesting or amusing interactions from the line sitting experience itself. For example:
-waking up at 4 am to see a 20 person Supreme Court Bar line materialize basically out of nowhere. It was composed almost entirely of paid line-sitters, who made a very strange bunch. It’s a little hard to describe how surreal this was at the time;
-seeing Annalee Newitz from EFF ask Jack Valenti to autograph a vintage Betmax tape early this morning–and seeing Valenti sportingly oblige;
-watching the argument between some of the campers further back from us and the MGM execs and P2P VC backers who showed up late to take places from hired sitters–and watching the Supreme Court police change their mind about the official policy on line-sitting over the course of the interaction.
-chatting with the [other people in line] was fun and valuable in itself. This included the general counsel (!) of MGM, who had to stand in the public line with the rest of us (albeit only after 7:30 am when he showed up to replace his sitter), because petitioners in Grokster had run out of tickets for parties. He was exceptionally personable and friendly.
Thanks to Eion and Mike for their reports.
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