I feel like the last few months have had a few things that have moved the debate in our direction. The recent govt report arguing that consent was not required for the sharing of anonymised medical data, ever growing awareness of problems in medical, and particularly psych, research which require more scrutiny of researchers work and data, the FINE data being put back on-line at PLoS with Manchester uni saying that there is no problem with the consent forms... but I don't know if any of that will be able to affect this ruling. Annoying some of this stuff didn't happen before the tribunal take place.
I think that the arguments for the release of this data are so strong that any further public debate on this issue amongst researchers will be to our benefit, so hopefully at least the ruling will do that. I think that we're now past the point where anyone will fall for the bigoted BS about patients just being concerned about PACE because they hate psychiatry, or are afraid of the stigma that comes with successful rehabilitative therapies... a ruling promoting that stuff would be somewhat irritating.