A Massachusetts music shop took its campaign to hold onto Liberace's rhinestone-encrusted piano to the First Circuit for the second time Wednesday, telling the appellate court that Gibson Guitars should never have been allowed to ask a jury for its return.

The circuit court heard oral arguments in the case after previously ruling in 2023 that Gibson was entitled to pursue a bailment claim, reversing the lower court's initial dismissal of the music store's lawsuit.

Counsel for Piano Mill and its owner, Rob Norris, told an appellate panel Wednesday that a district judge erred in rejecting Norris' pre-trial argument that the Gibson's claim to ownership was barred by its failure to include the 9-foot Baldwin grand piano as an asset in a 2018 bankruptcy filing.

Norris has said that's evidence showing Gibson, which owns the Baldwin Piano and Organ Co., had given him the sparkly piano outright for the cost of removing it from the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan in 2011.

A jury disagreed last summer, finding Norris was required to return the piano to Gibson.

The bankruptcy filing listed only a collection of historical musical instruments valued at about $47,000 and did not include the flashy piano — used by Liberace late in his career — which Norris had estimated was worth $500,000, his lawyer, Karen Pickett, told the panel Wednesday.

Pickett said U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani was wrong to find that judicial estoppel based on Gibson's failure to disclose the piano in the bankruptcy could apply only if Norris had shown evidence of fraudulent intent on the part of Gibson during the bankruptcy.

Gibson has contended that the piano was on loan to the music shop, about 20 miles south of Boston, under a bailment agreement, and sought its return after learning that the shop's roof had collapsed in a 2015 snowstorm.

The guitar maker, which has disputed Norris' $500,000 valuation of the piano, has said it did include the piano in its nonspecific list of assets consisting of a collection of hundreds of old musical instruments.

Counsel for Gibson Foundation Inc., Kurt Schuettinger of Bates & Bates LLC, said bankruptcy court rules include allowances for depreciation, and that Gibson did the best it could to estimate its value.

"We weren't trying to trick anyone," Schuettinger told the judges.

He also pointed to Norris' testimony during the July 2024 trial that he had based the value on an estimate.

Beyond that, Schuettinger suggested that even if the panel were to find there was some question of why the piano wasn't specifically included in the bankruptcy filing, judicial estoppel should not apply because the creditors that subsequently acquired the musical instrument manufacturer weren't the ones to make any representations as to the value of the piano.

Liberace was a popular entertainer for several decades starting in the 1950s. He played the Baldwin SD10 piano, customized with 10,000 rhinestones, in the 1980s, prior to his death in 1987.

U.S. Circuit Judges David J. Barron and Jeffrey R. Howard, and William J. Kayatta Jr. sat on the panel for the First Circuit.

Gibson is represented by Andrea Bates and Kurt Schuettinger of Bates & Bates LLC and Steve D. Howen of the Law Offices of Steve Howen.

Norris is represented by Karen A. Pickett of Pickett Law Offices PC.

The case is Gibson Foundation Inc. et al., v. Norris, et al., case number 24-1763, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.