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actual knowledge each time an individual consumer sends infringing material”—the unguarded remarks of a teenage cofounder notwithstanding. Again, Patel was having none of it, because all the other evidence suggested that the piracy bazaar Parker envisioned had very much come to fruition. “I don’t think system is just invested in and supported by a single nineteen-year-old,” she said from the bench. In any case, “if you have in fact designed a product, a system that is in fact designed to do just what it’s been doing, enabling infringing, enabling piracy, you can hardly stand back and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know all that stuff on there was pirated.’” Johnson jumped to the VCR decision, which he said allowed sharing films with friends. “All 79 million of them?” Patel asked. “Seventy million or seven,” Johnson ventured. “But doesn’t that take it beyond personal use?” Patel asked. Johnson attempted a hop to the Rio decision in the Ninth Circuit, which had interpreted the Supreme Court’s VCR ruling broadly to cover some other nonprofit copying, in that case from CDs to MP3s. Patel hadn’t telegraphed her thinking, but she had already made up her mind that the Rio case dealt with certain types of hardware, not giant interactive webs of software. Sensing that the last door was closing on him, Johnson pressed so hard that instead of allowing Patel to interrupt him, he interrupted her. It was as if the internal gunfighter that lives inside each litigator had seen he was surrounded and simply decided to go out with guns blazing.

The Rio case “doesn’t apply here, and I will explain why when I render my decision,” Patel said.

But in that decision, Johnson persisted, “once the CD is on a hard drive, what happens to it?”

“There’s no digital recording device, even by—” Patel began.

“You’re not listening. Let me try one more time. Once it’s on the hard drive—”

Patel interrupted him back, ending the exchange. “You’re finished,” she snapped. “You may have a seat.” After allowing brief rebuttals, Patel called for a break that lasted half an hour.

When she returned to the bench, Patel shocked almost everyone in the courtroom. “Plenty of time has been expended in preparing for the