OPENTV, Plaintiff, vs. LIBERATE TECHNOLOGIES, Defendants., 219 F.R.D. 474

Summary

Defendant argued that by agreeing to make its complete database available for inspection and copying, it had satisfied its obligations under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 by making the source code available for inspection in the order and manner in which it was kept in the ordinary course of business. The issue before the court was whether cost-shifting was appropriate. The court then noted that it would take between 125-150 hours of work to complete the extraction process for the approximately 100 additional versions of source code requested by plaintiff. For this reason, the court found that the requested electronic data was stored in an inaccessible format for the purposes of discovery. Furthermore, as the requested source code was highly likely to contain relevant information and was unavailable from another source, these two factors weighed against cost-shifting and in favor of defendant, as the responding party, bearing the cost of reducing the source code to a usable form. The court then ...