Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe
- Nelson Roman
- 7:24-cv-00653
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Strike 3 Holdings v. Doe, Judge Roman granted Strike 3 Holdings leave to file a motion seeking an early subpoena to identify the anonymous defendant.
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC may file a motion seeking early discovery from Spectrum to identify the anonymous defendant. The Doe defendant’s identity remains undisclosed in this order, and the order does not itself authorize the subpoena or decide liability.
What happened
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC sued an unidentified internet subscriber for allegedly infringing its copyrights through the BitTorrent file-sharing network. The company said it knew the defendant only by an internet protocol address and that Spectrum, the internet service provider, could use that address to identify the subscriber.
Strike 3 Holdings asked for permission to seek a subpoena before the usual early-case conference, so it could obtain the defendant’s name and address. The court granted the company leave to file a motion seeking that subpoena. The order did not itself authorize service of the subpoena or decide whether the defendant infringed copyrights.
Judge Nelson S. Roman also directed the Clerk of Court to terminate the motion at docket entry 6. The provided order does not expressly state a ruling on the request to postpone or avoid the initial scheduling conference.
The detailed version
- Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe · No. 7:24-cv-00653
- Nelson Roman
- Feb. 15, 2024
Background
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC filed a copyright-infringement case against a John Doe defendant whose name and address were unknown. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant’s internet protocol address had been used to infringe its copyrighted works through the BitTorrent file-distribution network. The plaintiff identified Spectrum as the relevant internet service provider and asserted that Spectrum’s records could connect the internet protocol address to a customer.
Request
The plaintiff asked for leave under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(d)(1) to file a motion seeking permission to serve a third-party subpoena on Spectrum before the parties held the conference normally required by Rule 26(f). The requested discovery was intended to identify the Doe defendant. The plaintiff also asked to postpone any initial scheduling conference until the defendant was identified and served.
The plaintiff argued that early discovery would be appropriate because it expected to make a preliminary showing of copyright infringement, would seek specific information, had no alternative way to obtain the defendant’s identity, needed the information centrally to proceed, and claimed the defendant had only a limited privacy interest in the information.
Ruling
The court granted the plaintiff leave to file a motion to serve a third-party subpoena. This ruling allowed the plaintiff to submit the subpoena request; it did not itself authorize service of the subpoena and did not resolve the copyright-infringement allegations. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate the motion at docket entry 6. The provided text does not expressly state how the court ruled on the separate request concerning the initial scheduling conference.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.