First off, I should say that the court reporter left out one very important attorney, Parker Folse, from her list of attending attorneys. So, for the record, it was the same "cast of characters" from the May Case Management Conference. That is, Burst had the numbers on Apple by a ratio of 2:1. For Burst: Parker Folse (rhymes with "hose"), Floyd Short, and Ian Crosby (Susman Godfrey, Seattle); Mike Heim (his own firm in Texas); Bruce Wecker (Hosie's firm in S.F.); and Robert Yorio (Carr & Ferrell in Palo Alto). For Apple: Matthew Powers, Nicholas Brown, Brian Way (?) (Weil Gotshal & Manges, Redwood Shores, CA). Apple's third attorney (Way?) is very young, and not listed on the firm's web site. John Neukom (the young attorney at Susman) was not present. Also absent, again, was Spencer Hosie.

Parker Folse started off for Burst on the matter of Brian Bershad, the Burst expert whom Apple was trying to disqualify. After a brief opening remark by Parker, Powers argued that Apple wanted him disqualified because of the short time between the end of the case (Gobeli Research) in which he worked as an expert for Apple and his hiring by Burst. "Your honor, there's no disagreement that he spent 29-50 hrs. with our attorneys during Gobeli ... What disturbs us is that just a few months earlier he was in our tent; now he's throwing stones at our tent."

Parker called his Susman partner, Floyd Short, up to address the court. Floyd had apparently spent a lot of time preparing for this argument along with Bershad. He explained how the technology at issue in the two cases was entirely unrelated and that Bershad couldn't have learned any confidential info from Apple as everything he received came off the public web site, and was open source software. Powers made a feeble attempt to connect the two technologies, saying that in both cases "We are dealing with signals that are passing back and forth in a timing method, and in this case it's all about timing issues such as realtime..." (That's about as well as I can remember or understand what he was trying to say at that moment. I had to laugh at what he was saying from a technical stand point, but the judge was apparently not focusing on this argument at all. She was more concerned about the "work product" of Bershad while in the employ of Apple, and whether he heard or learned anything from Apple in the prior case that COULD POTENTIALLY be construed by Apple to be confidential AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE. This is where she focused, and this is the basis for the decision she made.

Rather than writing a summary of her decision, I think I will write, from this point on, some of the words of the parties and the judge. You can get a flavor for the courtroom discussions, and also some insights into J. Patel herself. From my notes:

Floyd Short (FS): This week Apple will be providing us additional source code. And we've already received some 200,000 pages of technical information on the iPod, iTunes software...We retained Brian Bershad in the spring and he has been working for Burst all this time, your honor. He's received no confidential information from Apple. It was all open source software -- publicly available -- plus he received no oral confidential information from Apple.