Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe
- Analisa Torres
- 1:24-cv-02512
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Strike 3 Holdings v. Doe, Judge Stein granted permission to seek early subpoena discovery and did not schedule a conference at this time.
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC may file a motion seeking early third-party subpoena discovery from Spectrum to identify the John Doe defendant. The Doe defendant and the requested Internet-service-provider records are directly affected; the initial scheduling conference was not scheduled at this time.
What happened
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC sued a John Doe defendant for alleged copyright infringement involving the BitTorrent file-sharing network. The plaintiff said it knew the defendant only by an Internet Protocol address and asked to seek information from Spectrum, the Internet service provider, to learn the defendant’s identity.
The plaintiff requested permission to file a motion for a subpoena before the parties’ required discovery conference. It also asked the court not to schedule the initial case-management conference until the defendant was identified and served.
The court granted the request to file the motion and stated that the initial case-management conference would not be scheduled at that time. The order was signed by Judge Gary Stein.
The detailed version
- Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe · No. 1:24-cv-02512
- Analisa Torres
- Apr. 10, 2024
Background
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC brought a copyright-infringement action against a John Doe defendant whose name and address were not known. The plaintiff stated that the defendant’s Internet Protocol address had been used to infringe its copyrighted works through the BitTorrent file-distribution network.
The plaintiff said that Spectrum, the Internet service provider associated with the address, could use its records to identify the subscriber assigned to the address. It asked for permission to file a motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(d)(1) seeking a third-party subpoena before the parties held the required Rule 26(f) discovery conference. The plaintiff also asked the court to postpone any initial Rule 16 scheduling conference until the defendant was named and served.
Ruling
The court granted the plaintiff’s request to file the motion seeking leave to serve the third-party subpoena. The order also stated that the initial scheduling conference would not be scheduled at that time. The text does not state the deadline for filing the motion; the relevant deadline appears incomplete or illegible in the provided copy.
Effect
The order did not itself authorize service of the subpoena or decide the copyright-infringement claim. It permitted Strike 3 Holdings to file a motion seeking early discovery aimed at identifying the Doe defendant. The order was signed by Gary Stein, United States Magistrate Judge.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.