Recently I represented a client who had been notified of a subpoena served on their Internet Service Provider by Strike 3 Holdings. The subpoena sought their name, address, and so on for the purpose of filing a copyright infringement against them.
Strike 3 produces and distributes pornography. They target copyright infringement lawsuits at people who allegedly download and redistribute Strike 3’s pornographic content without permission. BitTorrent is a particularly fecund platform for Strike 3 copyright infringement lawsuits. Strike 3 has developed a tool that randomly attempts to download their pornography through BitTorrent, and thereby identifies (by IP address) BitTorrent client computers that have copies of Strike 3 content. Strike 3 then serves subpoenas on the ISPs of those IP addresses. The subpoenas seek to identify the internet subscribers who are associated with the IP addresses of BitTorrent clients that allegedly have copies of Strike 3’s porn movies.
Naturally, people are averse to being named in a public lawsuit about the illegal copying of pornographic movies.
So my client got a notice of subpoena and asked me to sort things out before they had their name in a lawsuit about porn.
It should be noted that the court which granted Strike 3 permission for the subpoena, did so with a lot of conditions to limit Strike 3’s use or publication of my client’s identity. In particular, the court restricted Strike 3 to pursuing the lawsuit anonymously in all public filings. Even if the subpoena were to reveal my client’s identity to Strike 3, they were required to file “under seal” any papers that had my client’s identity. While this would preserve anonymity for a while, there still would be a risk of the seal being lifted in the future.
Fortunately, I was able to help my client resole the dispute without their identity ever being disclosed to Strike 3.
