The Globe’s MetroDesk blog-like-object reports that in the case of the BU student who faces $675,000 in damages for downloading 30 songs, a judge has denied an attempt by the record labels to stop him linking to and talking about a playlist of the songs that was sent to The Pirate Bay file-sharing service. From the story:

There was no evidence that (student Joel) Tenenbaum was responsible for putting the playlist on The Pirate Bay. But the labels accused him of defiantly promoting further illegal downloading by linking to the service directly from a website created for his defense. The labels asked (US District Court Judge Nancy) Gertner to order him to stop promoting illegally activity, which she rejected.

I imagine the blog post will be expanded into a longer story in tomorrow’s paper. It indicates that Tenenbaum,  a 25-year-old doctoral student in physics, is likely to request a new trial and ask that the damages, awarded by a jury, be reduced.

Follow-up: Here’s the story in today’s paper. You can compare the two versions and see the changes made by more reporting/writing/editing - it doesn’t look like many changes were made.