With respect, Judge Howell’s new order is NOT a change in course from previous ones. Arguing as amici curiae, Public Citizen, the EFF and the ACLU argued that the data from IP addresses was clear enough that the anonymous defendants were not in or near DC that the plaintiff should have to sue elsewhere and get subpoenas from those courts. Judge Howell rejected that argument, saying that the subpoena stage was to early to consider personal jurisdiction.

All she has done here is decide that, once the plaintiff gets identifying information, the plaintiff must eventually dismiss those defendants against whom plaintiff does not intend to proceed in the DDC. That is the same approach as adopted by Judge Collyer here in DDC, an approach Judge Howell followed in the opinion she issued rejecting the approach for which we argued as amici curiae. We argued, in fact, that if she allowed personal jurisdiction she should, at least, order dismissal immediately upon getting the actual ID, instead of letting the plaintiff keep defendants in the case for months at a time in the hope of shaking money out of more Does by the implicit threat of making them defend in DC. Judge Howell has, regrettably, followed Judge Collyer in giving the plaintiffs more time to extort settlement payments through the implicit threat of having to defend in a geographically inconvient forum.

I note here that Mike does not embrace the contention that the blogs made a difference, but only notes that some people are claiming that. Myself, I think it highly unlikely that Judge Howell did anything differently based on the fact that some bloggers complained about her previous time in legal practice helping the RIAA (or, indeed, the fact that she was sympathetic with the concerns of copyright holders when she worked for Senator Leahy). Suggestions from some bloggers that their own condemnation played a role in this order strike me as a reflection of inflated self-importance.

Those connections are not anything that would have required her to recuse herself, and not anything that would cause any federal judge to be embarrassed. Judges come to the bench with worldviews formed by their time as lawyers before they became judges. Neither criminal defense lawyers nor prosecutors who become judges have to recuse themselves from criminal prosecutions generally just because their attitudes may well be affected by their legal experiences as practitioners. They just have to recuse from specific cases in which they or their law offices were involved.

The same is true for judges who, as lawyers, were in private practice and who presented the interests of companies or trade groups. Some judges do choose, for a discrete period of time, to stay off cases in which their old law firms or former clients are involved. But the RIAA is not a party to these cases.