Yes, that Kiwi Camara. Now, after graduating from Harvard Law magna cum laude and launching a law firm in Houston, Camara is 26 and returning to the limelight with a petition before the Supreme Court in Harper v. Maverick Recording Company. It is the first music-downloading copyright case to reach the Court from a wave of litigation launched by the recording industry to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America or its members sued or threatened to sue more than 40,000 people for infringing record company copyrights, according to Camara’s brief.
Camara made history when he started at Harvard Law, but he made headlines the next year when he uploaded his class notes, as requested, to a Harvard web site for the use of future students. His mistake: using offensive shorthand terms in his notes, such as this one to describe the Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer: “Nigs buy land w/no nig covenant: Q: Enforceable?” The resulting uproar produced calls for censuring Camara and enacting a speech code at the law school. In The People v. Harvard Law, a book that focused in part on the Camara episode, author Andrew Peyton Thomas wrote that with one mouse click, Camara had “ruin[ed] his career before it began.”
