A Northern California District Court handed down an order on March 30, denying permission to a company called Hard Drive Productions to subpoena ISPs for user names and addresses associated with certain IP addresses.
The order shows a growing impatience on the part of many judges for "copyright troll" cases, especially in instances where the plaintiff has no desire to litigate, but hopes to merely use the court system to extract monetarily attractive settlements from a wide range of defendants that the plaintiff can't directly identify. Instead, copyright holders have been suing "John Does" for each IP address caught downloading their copyrighted material. But this doesn't fly in Judge Howard R. Lloyd's court anymore.
"After filing suit, the plaintiff requests that the court let it conduct expedited discovery, by subpoenaing the various ISPs whose IP addresses appear in the [BitTorrent] swarm, ostensibly to identify and name the defendants in the action," presiding Judge Lloyd's order read, "Ordinarily, such discovery is prohibited by Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(d). However, plaintiff assures the court that if it will permit this 'limited' discovery, the plaintiff can subpoena the ISPs for subscriber information associated with each IP address, and then name and serve the defendants so that the case may go forward."
In recent days, judges in Illinois and Florida have denied similar "fishing expeditions" by copyright holders to reel in contact information from IP address holders.
In his order, Judge Lloyd references an prior Ninth Circuit court decision that allowed such a discovery period "unless it is clear that discovery would not uncover the identities." As with many instances where copyright holders subpoena ISPs for the identity of IP address holders, the resulting IP address holder is not always the copyright violator. Many individuals can upload and download files on a single IP address, so the early discovery allowance is not valid.
The order is an important one, signalling that courts are wising up to copyright holders that may be manipulating the court system to conduct extrajudicial business. It's not the end of litigating illegal file-sharers, but the order was certainly something of a win for a more free and anonymous Internet. "The court realizes that this decision may frustrate plaintiff and other copyright holders who, quite understandably, wish to curtail online infringement of their works," Judge Lloyd's order read, "Unfortunately, it would appear that the technology that enables copyright infringement has outpaced technology that prevents it."
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