Reddit Pushes Back On Idiotic Unmasking Fishing Expedition By Movie Studios

Bear with me here, because this is going to take some explaining as a matter of throat-clearing for this post, which is actually the entire problem.

Back in 2021, several film studios filed a lawsuit against ISP RCN, accusing it of ignoring piracy conducted by its customers. That suit mostly followed the same bullshit playbook used by studios in the past: copyright infringement was occurring by RCN customers, RCN didn't do enough to play copyright police, therefore give us a whole bunch of money. But where this gets weird is that the studios wanted to present evidence of RCN's blind eye towards piracy and, for some reason, decided that comments on Reddit forums going back over a decade ago were just the evidence they needed. As part of that, the studios demanded that Reddit unmask 9 of those users it claimed were involved in the piracy, according to them. Reddit only complied with 1 individual and pushed back on the other 8.

As a result of that, those studios filed a motion in court to try and force Reddit to comply.

The film companies last week filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena in US District Court for the Northern District of California. The latest filing and the ongoing dispute over the subpoena were detailed in a TorrentFreak article published Saturday.

The evidence Plaintiff requests from Reddit in the Rule 45 subpoena is clearly relevant and proportional to the needs of the case," the film studios' motion said. The Reddit users' comments allegedly establish that RCN has not reasonably implemented a policy for terminating repeat infringers," that RCN controls the conduct of its subscribers and monitors its subscribers' access," and establish that the ability to freely pirate without consequence was a draw to becoming a subscriber of RCN."

The reason for some of the specific language the studios used is that requests like this come with a very high bar over which they must hurtle. That is because there are rather severe First Amendment implications involved in unmasking an anonymous internet user as a result of their speech.

And based on the response filed by Reddit, the studios are completely full of shit, or were massively incompetent in their requests.

Reddit's new motion said the film studios cannot overcome the Reddit users' First Amendment rights because the users' posts Plaintiffs have identified as the basis for this subpoena are completely irrelevant to Plaintiffs' lawsuit." Reddit continued:

Four of the seven users at issue do not appear to have ever even mentioned RCN, based on the evidence offered by Plaintiffs. They merely refer to my provider" or our ISP." And those references are all made in a discussion about Comcast, not RCN. Plaintiffs' argument that the users are very likely" referring to RCN should be rejected as speculative. Two of the three remaining users did mention RCN, but were discussing issues (such as their customer service experience) unrelated to copyright infringement or Plaintiffs' allegations. And the final user vaguely mentioned RCN arguably in the context of copyright infringement once nine years ago, well beyond any arguably relevant timeframe for Plaintiffs' allegations.

Which is precisely what Reddit has been talking about this entire time as it has continuously described this entire thing as a fishing expedition by the studios. They want to find evidence that somehow ties RCN users specifically to discussions about how they can get away with piracy using RCN as an ISP. But if this is the best they can do, then perhaps it would be better to simply drop this entire original lawsuit, because as far as good evidence goes, this ain't it. In most cases, RCN isn't even the ISP in question, and it also wasn't the subject of the Reddit thread for several of the users the studios are seeking to unmask.

The February 2022 thread was started by a user explaining that they had received a copyright infringement email from Comcast and expressing that they were kinda worried,'" Reddit wrote. In the year since, there have been over 240 replies in that discussion. Among those hundreds of comments about Comcast's copyright practices, one mentions RCN."

Reddit said it provided identifying information for that one user to the plaintiffs. But the remaining four Comcast Users are now being targeted merely because they happened to post in the Comcast Thread, despite the fact that none of the users were responding or referring to any discussion of RCN, and none mention RCN themselves," Reddit wrote.

Reddit's filing goes on with more details. For starters, several of the targets for unmasking that actually were RCN customers... never discussed piracy. Like, at all. The studios also claimed that because one user talked about how RCN had reset their home router, this somehow means that Reddit monitors and controls" the actual behavior of the customer while on the internet. Which is pretty fucking stupid, because maintaining infrastructure and monitoring web activity are two completely separate things. And then there's this...

The studios argued that the 2009 post establishes that RCN has the technical ability [to monitor users]. If RCN had the ability 13 years ago, it certainly still has the ability now." The post in question said RCN replaced an error page with branded search results. Reddit told the court that the post doesn't prove what the film studios claim:

This practice is known as NXDOMAIN DNS hijacking, and many ISPs have engaged in it to display advertisements to their customers. It has absolutely nothing to do with copyright infringement or piracy... DNS hijacking does not demonstrate ever-present surveillance or control by an ISP over its users. It instead reflects an ISP's global policy of routing certain DNS calls to an IP address of their choosing.

You know, it sure would be nice if these film studios, prior to pumping out this motion before the court, could be bothered to actually understand what the hell they were talking about. Almost none of this makes any sense as part of its lawsuit against RCN, it would absolutely violate core First Amendment principles, and is obviously the fishing expedition that Reddit has been claiming it is.

You can read the entire filing embedded below, but hopefully these studios get laughed out of this particular court with speed.