Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe
- Nelson Roman
- 7:24-cv-07295
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Strike 3 Holdings v. Doe, Judge Roman granted permission to file a motion seeking a third-party subpoena to identify the unnamed defendant.
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC may file a motion seeking permission to serve a third-party subpoena on Verizon Fios to identify the unnamed defendant. The Doe defendant remains unnamed in the provided text.
What happened
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC sued an unnamed defendant identified only by an Internet Protocol address, alleging that the defendant used BitTorrent to infringe its copyrights. The defendant’s name and address were not known.
The plaintiff asked to file a motion for permission to subpoena Verizon Fios before the parties’ required early conference, seeking information that could identify the subscriber assigned to the Internet Protocol address. It also asked to postpone the initial scheduling conference until the defendant could be identified and served.
In Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, Judge Nelson S. Roman granted the request to file the motion seeking permission for the third-party subpoena. The order directed the Clerk to terminate the motion; the text provided does not state that the subpoena itself was authorized.
The detailed version
- Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe · No. 7:24-cv-07295
- Nelson Roman
- Oct. 16, 2024
Background
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC filed this copyright-infringement case against a John Doe defendant. The plaintiff said it knew the defendant only through an Internet Protocol address and did not know the defendant’s name or address. According to the plaintiff, the address had been used to infringe copyrighted works through the BitTorrent file-distribution network.
The plaintiff stated that it owns copyrights to movies distributed through three subscription-based adult websites. It sought information from Verizon Fios, the Internet service provider associated with the Internet Protocol address, because the provider’s records could identify the subscriber assigned to that address.
Request
Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(d)(1), discovery generally cannot begin before the parties’ Rule 26(f) conference without a court order. The plaintiff asked for permission to file a motion seeking leave to serve a third-party subpoena before that conference. The proposed subpoena would seek limited information from Verizon Fios to identify the Doe defendant.
The plaintiff also asked the court to postpone any initial scheduling conference until the defendant was identified and served. In support of its request, the plaintiff cited factors courts consider in copyright cases, including a preliminary showing of infringement, a specific discovery request, the lack of alternative ways to obtain the information, the importance of the information, and the defendant’s limited expectation of privacy.
Ruling
Judge Nelson S. Roman granted the plaintiff’s request to file a motion seeking leave to serve the third-party subpoena. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate the motion at ECF No. 6. The provided text does not say that the court granted the subpoena itself, and it does not expressly state how the request to postpone the scheduling conference was resolved.
Classification
This is a procedural order concerning pre-conference discovery and a request to identify an unnamed defendant. The court did not decide the underlying copyright-infringement claims.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.