William J. Elfving
American judge
William Johnson Elfving (born March 17, 1941) is an American lawyer and former judge of the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. He was appointed to the bench on November 13, 1997, and retired in 2017. Prior to his appointment he was in private practice for 30 years. He is the chair of the Superior Court Arbitration/ADR committee. He is most notable because of his many rulings on specialized areas of intellectual property law.
Education
He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University in 1962 and a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law in 1965.
Military service
After completing law school, he served as a Captain in the United States Army from 1965 to 1967.
Legal & Judicial career
From 1967 to 1997 he was a shareholder with Hoge, Fenton, Jones & Appel.
He was appointed to the Santa Clara County Superior Court by Governor Pete Wilson on November 13, 1997, and remained there until he retired in 2017.
Notable rulings
In a 1999–2000 case involving the DVD crack DeCSS, which allows users to evade copyright protections on DVDs allowing them to directly upload content onto their hard disk drive, he first denied the industry's "very broad request" for a temporary restraining order banning websites from the sale or distribution of the program or linking to places where it might be found, but later issued a preliminary injunction barring sites from selling or distributing the program.
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