Reddit tells court: Film studios spewed “nonsense” in demand for users’ names
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Reddit is fighting a film-industry attempt to identify users who discussed piracy, telling a federal court that the studios' request for users' real names should be rejected and that one of the studios' arguments is "nonsense."
"Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects online anonymity and have established a stringent standard to use in precisely this scenario, where a litigant seeks to unmask users for the purpose of providing evidence in litigation that does not involve those users... Plaintiffs are far from meeting that strict standard here," Reddit said Tuesday in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
We detailed the film studios' attempt to unmask Reddit users in a story last week. Reddit has no involvement in the lawsuit that triggered the request for users' identities-the studios behind films such as Hellboy, Rambo V: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard sued cable broadband provider RCN in a different court, alleging that RCN failed to terminate Internet subscribers who illegally downloaded copyrighted movies. (RCN is now known as Astound Broadband after being combined with several other cable ISPs in the same ownership group.)