American movie studios have filed a request to receive user data from six Reddit users. They made that request in the context of an underlying dispute between the 20 film studios involved and Internet service provider Grande. Namely, the movie studios believe that Grande can be held liable for the frequent illegal downloading and uploading of 45 films by Grande's customers, writes Nienke de Visser (Kennedy Van der Laan).
Grande would be liable for this because Grande does too little against the illegal distribution of online content. Grande's reputation as an Internet service provider that turns a blind eye by default would result in more and more avid Internet pirates switching to Grande's services, according to the movie studios.
Grande's failure to take action against online piracy - and is known for it - is also evidenced by a number of comments made by anonymous users of online forum Reddit, according to the movie studios. These include comments under a post titled "Texas ISP [Grande] slams music biz for trying to turn it into a copyright cop." One user wrote underneath: "I have Grande and torrent a lot. Always thought it was pretty cool of them to not snitch". Another commented, "[l]ike everyone else I miss Grande and I'm stuck with Spectrum or AT&T in my area. I use Spectrum. Those fuckers have turned my connection off completely on one occasion and would not turn it back on until I agreed to stop pirating media." A third Reddit user writes: "I have torrented like a motherfucker all over grande and have never seen anything."
The name and address information allows the movie studios to contact Reddit users. In this way, they hope to gather evidence for their claim that Grande customers illegally used torrents. In addition, this way they want to substantiate that the Reddit users were customers of Grande because it is easy(er) to receive and distribute illegal content through Grande.
Reddit refuses to relinquish the data. Reddit's defense is that users' freedom of speech, which includes the right to express oneself anonymously, should take precedence over the movie studios' interest in receiving the data. Also, the movie studios do not need this information because they can substantiate their claims in other ways, Reddit argues.
The San Francisco court agreed with Reddit. In the ruling the court considers that the right to express oneself anonymously is not unlimited and thus there are cases where a party does have to share user data. This is only true if the request is (i) made in good faith and not for an improper purpose, (ii) the identifying information is directly and substantially relevant, and (iii) the information is not available through another source.
The court clearly held that these criteria were not met. For example, the movie studios have not shown that the data sought is directly and substantially relevant and not obtainable by other means. A factor here is that the movie studios already hold user data from 118 other Reddit users. Therefore, it is not clear why the movie studios cannot go after these users to prove the claim that Grande's piracy business practices resulted in her attracting mostly customers who wanted to download illegally. According to the judge, that could provide at least equivalent, if not better, evidence. After all, the six Reddit users in question will provide little meaningful evidence, the judge considers in the last sentence of the ruling, "it is at best weak evidence about Grande's insufficient policy regarding repeat infringers or its appeal to pirating subscribers."
The film studios' request is denied.
