This morning, for about 50 minutes, Judge Socrates Manoukian heard arguments on the Motion to Quash the Subpoena in Eclipse Aviation Corp. v. John Doe et al., No. 1-08-CV-110380, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County.
Rather than ruling on the motion, he then set a schedule for further written submissions from the parties, and set a second hearing date of Friday, August 1, at 10:00 A.M..
I'll try to post a longer report sometime tomorrow.
Update on Monday, June 9: Sorry, I didn't get a chance to write anything over the weekend. Here's a slightly longer report, covering what little was actually ordered at the hearing:
1. Per agreement of the parties, Judge Manoukian: (a) ordered Eclipse's attorney to immediately give the Does' attorney a copy of the Complaint that initiated the litigation; and (b) ordered the Does' attorney not to show the Complaint to anyone, not even his clients. (The Complaint has never been filed in the California court. It was filed under seal in the New Mexico court back on March 18.)
2. He continued the hearing to 10:00 A.M. on Friday, August 1, and gave the Does until Thursday, July 10 to file a supplemental brief, with a supplemental opposition from Eclipse due by Monday, July 21, and the Does' supplemental reply due Friday, July 25.
I think I'll wait until I have a copy of the official transcript before I do a longer write-up of the hearing. It will probably be a few weeks before I get the transcript. In the meantime, I hope that by the end of this week I'll have added a few more documents to the Court Documents page, especially the opposition brief that Eclipse filed back on May 23. That's the document that contains Eclipse's response to the arguments in the Does' opening brief. It also (presumably) explains exactly how Eclipse believes its other opposition papers (such as the Raburn Declaration) support Eclipse's arguments.
(That opposition brief has officially been a public document since the day it was filed (May 23). The court, Eclipse's lawyer, and the Does' lawyer all have copies of it, and I've asked all three of them to show it to me, but they've all thus far refused to do so. Of course, the only one of those three with an obligation to show its copy to the public is the court, and there's no particular time frame for that obligation. Thus, I've had to accept the parties' answers of "No", and the court's answer of "We'll let you see it sometime after the hearing".)
My requests for permission to make an audio recording of the hearing were denied. As I discussed in my June 4 letter to Judge Manoukian, that means that I may never be legally able to "provide the public with a complete, spin-free account of what occurred at the hearing", because official transcripts from proceedings in California courts are given a sort of pseudo-copyright protection by California Government Code §69954(d). I will, however, at least post some excerpts from the transcript, once I get my copy of it.
