The Curious Propsenity of Some Cypherpunks for (loud) Willful Ignorance. Was: Re: Spoliation cites

[Dr. Evil]

> > Judges have never attempted such crap, and if they do, lawyers will

Please do a search for "Negativland" and "U2" on your favorite search
engine.  They were ordered to return to the court or U2's reccord
label or whatever, all the copies they had of their U2 album.  Every
single copy.  Interestingly, there was a distrinction between digital
and analog copies; Negativland would distributed tapes at their shows,
but never CDs.  Anyway, U2 got quite embarassed by this, so they may
have told their lawyers to back off, after the case was all over.

But the point is, yes, definitely the judge can demand every single
copy of a document, and this case clearly demonstrates it in action.
Negativland weren't arrested, but they did go into bankruptcy because
of this, and they had to go into hiding to escape creditors.  Perhaps
now they would just be arrested, I don't know.