Reddit Defeats Film Studios’ Attempt To Reveal Identities Of Anonymous Users Over RCN Trial

Back in March, we discussed a fairly silly request, made by several film producers who are suing RCN for not being their copyright police, that the court subpoena Reddit to unmask 9 users of that site. There were several aspects of the request that made it all very dumb: half the Reddit users never mentioned RCN, most referenced Comcast being their ISP, most of the remaining users never mentioned anything about piracy, and the one user who did mention RCN and piracy in context together had done so nearly a decade prior to the lawsuit. Given the First Amendment implications and hurdles involved in a request like this, the desire for the subpoena seemed doomed to fail.

And fail it did. The court voided the subpoena entirely, stating that the request was immaterial to the trial brought against RCN.

Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online.

Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard.

It's the right decision, to be sure. While the studios' assertions were questionable generally, the standard the court applied in this instance was weighing essentially whether the anonymous comments, and commenters by extension, served as a primary or only source of the information they sought for the RCN trial. The court then goes through on a user by user basis to analyze whether that was the case, finding in all instances that it was not. Below is one example.

The user compypaq" said that RCN would sometimes remotely reset his modem. The plaintiffs contend that this comment helps show that RCN can monitor and control its customers' conduct, because the ability to reset a modem implies the ability to turn off a modem. This argument only reinforces that the plaintiffs can obtain the information they seek from RCN. It isn't necessary to subpoena the identities of RCN customers from a third party to determine whether RCN can disable its customers' internet access.

In other words, the request only makes sense as a fishing expedition, in which the plaintiffs aren't actually after the information they claim to be. And because of that, the court quashed the subpoena.

If those plaintiffs want the actual information they sought to enter into evidence from these Reddit users, they will have to get it through the normal discovery process at the RCN trial.