The district court’s conclusion that rules governing personal jurisdiction and venue provide no impediment to pre-Rule 26 discovery of the ISPs is legal error. A showing of “good cause,” which is required for discovery ostensibly intended to identify defendants, requires an evaluation of whether the information sought from the ISPs would be used to name and serve defendants in the forum. See, e.g., Oppenheimer Fund, Inc. v. Sanders, 437 U.S. 340, 352-53 & n.17 (1978) (where “the purpose of a discovery request is to gather information for use in proceedings other than the pending suit, discovery properly is denied”). The Copyright Act and the District of Columbia’s long-arm statute limit the court’s reach to defendants who reside in the district. And the uncontroverted evidence before the district court showed that few, if any, of the targeted Internet subscribers reside in the District of Columbia—as publicly available geolocation software used by Plaintiff’s counsel in other cases confirms. The district court’s decision to defer any consideration of personal jurisdiction or venue until after the subscribers’ personal information had been disclosed to Plaintiff requires reversal.

The court’s decision to permit discovery of the ISPs before deciding whether the 1,000-plus “Does” are misjoined provides an additional basis for reversal. Plaintiff, by routinely declining to name and serve defendants after obtaining the subscribers’ personal information, virtually ensures that Rule 20’s requirements for joinder will go unaddressed if not evaluated at the outset. And as a growing majority of courts have concluded, deferring a ruling on joinder deprives the courts of filing fees and encourages a proliferation of improperly coercive lawsuits. Given the groundswell of published opinions that disagree with the lower court and have severed or dismissed non-resident “Does” or all Does except for “Doe No. 1,” deferring a ruling on joinder in a suit that seeks nationwide subscriber information also encourages forum shopping—as the record here shows persuasively.

The record reflects that Plaintiff’s counsel’s cases have migrated across the country, with the venues selected, not by the locus of the parties or situs of harm, but based on counsel’s perceptions of which forum is most likely to authorize the greatest discovery, at the lowest cost, with the least judicial oversight.

The specter of intra-district, judge-specific shopping in Plaintiff’s counsel’s cases further underscores the problem with the lower court’s approach. The ISPs raised below Plaintiff’s counsel’s practice of filing complaints and dismissing them vel non based on the judicial assignment—only to re-file in another court. When presented with the same facts, Judge Wilkins quoted with approval Judge Huvelle’s finding: “Plaintiff’s actions a[re] akin to ‘judge shopping.’… This Court could not agree more.” ...

The ISPs respectfully submit that the district courts in this Circuit should not be the destination for 1,000-plus Doe cases that are brought primarily to compile mailing lists—not to adjudicate actual cases or controversies.

AF Holdings and its counsel owe a duty of candor to the Court, and a duty of fairness to appellants.... The serious issues concerning attorney misconduct and potentially forged documents were not identified for the court below; they necessarily affect the “good cause” analysis and provide an alternative basis for reversal to address the evidence now being considered in the pending disciplinary proceedings in the Central District of California.

Specifically, in a series of cases beginning with Dendrite Int’l, Inc. v. Doe No. 3, 775 A.2d 756, 760-61, 342 N.J. Super. 134 (App. Div. 2001), courts have adopted a balancing standard to assess requests for early discovery to identify anonymous online speakers that protects the right to speak anonymously while at the same time ensuring that plaintiffs who have valid claims are able to pursue them. Without such a standard, abusive plaintiffs could too easily use extrajudicial means against defendants from whom they could not, in the end, obtain judicial redress. See Levy, Litigating Civil Subpoenas to Identify Anonymous Internet Speakers, 37 Litigation No. 3 (Spring 2011).

The use of BitTorrent to select and share movies is expressive and, therefore, protected by the First Amendment. Call of the Wild Movie, 770 F. Supp. 2d at 350 (“[F]ile-sharers are engaged in expressive activity, on some level, when they share files on BitTorrent, and their First Amendment rights must be considered before the Court allows the plaintiffs to override the putative defendants’ anonymity.”).

Although the expressive aspect of the conduct alleged here – the posting of copyrighted movies to BitTorrent – is somewhat minimal, that does not mean that discovery to identify the anonymous user without adequate initial evidence that individual Doe Defendants committed the alleged infringement. The weakness of AF Holdings’ assertions of personal jurisdiction and proper joinder means that First Amendment concerns weigh more strongly here in favor of quashing the subpoenas. Certainly it was not appropriate for the district court to ignore the question altogether.

In its judgment, the Court of Appeal says extradition hearings are not criminal trials and that the judge deciding whether to order extradition has only to be satisfied there is a case to answer.

The court said the US government had a duty of "candour and good faith" in making an extradition bid, but a summary of the evidence held would suffice.

Given that Apple has not clearly shown how it has in fact been undercompensated for the losses it has suffered due to Samsung’s dilution of its trade dress, this Court, in its discretion, does not find a damages enhancement to be appropriate.

The judge had asked Twitter to show why it wasn’t in contempt of court after refusing to produce information about Twitter posts by protester Malcolm Harris in response to a subpoena from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

“I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily,” Sciarrino said.

“It’s pretty outrageous that the D.A.’s office wants to prohibit Twitter from exercising its right to appeal,” said Martin Stolar, a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild who represents Harris, after the hearing.

Whether the District Court erred by concluding that making a copyrighted work available for download on an online file-sharing network is insufficient to constitute a 'distribution' under 106(3) of the Copyright Act, and therefore refusing to enjoin Defendant from making Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings available to the public.

Whether the District Court erred by concluding that it had committed an error in instructing the jury that making a copyrighted work available for download on a online file-sharing network constitutes a "distribution' under 106(3) of the copyright Act and therefor vacating the jury's verdict and ordering a new trial.

Whether the District Court erred by holding that the jury's award of statutory damages for defendant's willful copyright infringement violated the due process clause even though it was well within the range of damages awards authorized by 504(c) of the Copyright Act.

The Court concludes that an award of $1.5 million for stealing and distributing 24 songs for personal use is appalling. Such an award is so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable. In this particular case, involving a first-time willful, consumer infringer of limited means who committed illegal song file-sharing for her own personal use, an award of $2,250 per song, for a total award of $54,000, is the maximum award consistent with due process.

This reduced award is punitive and substantial. It acts as a potent deterrent. It is a higher award than the Court might have chosen to impose in its sole discretion, but the decision was not for this Court to make. The Court has merely reduced the jury’s award to the maximum amount permitted under our Constitution.

Plaintiffs further request that the Court include language in the injunction barring Defendant from making any of Plaintiffs’ sound recordings available for distribution to the public. Plaintiffs argue that, if Thomas-Rasset makes Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works available on a peer-to-peer network, she will have completed all of the steps necessary for her to engage in the same illegal distribution of Plaintiffs’ works for which she has already been found liable. Because the Court has held that the Copyright Act does not provide a making-available right, it will not enjoin Thomas-Rasset from making the copyrighted sound recordings available to the public.

Was file sharing in existence at the time the statute was passed?

Is "making available" the same as distribution?

"It's more than that, your honor. It's really the complete undermining of the copyright. What I mean by that is you can't just isolate what's going on here as if it's an individual's, by copying it, has not gone and bought the work on iTunes or not bought the work in a record store when we used to have record stores. What happens is, by distributing it to others, there are... the viral nature of this technology, really has a substantial impact on the value of the work. And the way I'd ask you to think about it is this: one, I think, relevant question in a statutory damages case is, what would it cost to get a license for what the defendant has done. And, if all the defendant had done was making a copy and that was it, then maybe an analogy to just getting a copy off of iTunes would be appropriate. But here, by distributing it... if someone wanted to go to one of the record companies and say 'we'd like to do what the defendant did in this case,' the value of that license would be essentially the value of the entire copyrighted work. Because the effect of putting this work up on peer-to-peer technology is essentially you take a copyrighted work, and put it in the public domain."

plaintiffs have good reason to believe that their communications in particular, will fall within the scope of the broad surveillance that they can assume the government will conduct. The plaintiffs testify that in order to carry out their jobs they must regularly communicate by telephone and e-mail with precisely the sorts of individuals that the government will most likely seek to monitor – i.e., individuals “the U.S. government believes or believed to be associated with terrorist organizations,” “political and human rights activists who oppose governments that are supported economically or militarily by the U.S. government,” and “people located in geographical areas that are a special focus of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism or diplomatic efforts.” The plaintiffs’ assessment that these individuals are likely targets of [FISA Amendments Act] surveillance is reasonable, and the government has not disputed that assertion.

While Plaintiffs do not believe that either verdict was improper under the law, or that the second verdict should be remitted, they would have considered accepting a remittitur simply so that this case could finally come to an end. However, any remittitur must otherwise be consistent with the law and be guided by what actual juries have awarded under similar circumstances. Unfortunately, Plaintiffs find it impossible to accept a remittitur that could be read to set a new standard for statutory damages -- essentially capping those damages at three times the minimum statutory amount of $750 (or $2,250) for any "noncommercial individuals who illegally download and upload music." (Id. at 2, 25.) This far-reaching determination is contrary to the law and creates a statutory scheme that Congress did not intend or enact.

Indeed, Congress has spoken on this very topic. Congress deliberately and purposefully established a range of statutory damages that applies without regard to the commercial motivation of the defendant.

A rule that the maximum permissible award in cases involving so-called "noncommercial" infringers is three times minimum statutory damages also ignores the harm caused by such infringers. From an economic perspective, individuals who give away copyrighted works illegally can cause as much harm as those who sell those works illegally, particularly when the so-called "non-commercial" infringer uses a P2P service. The notion that an infringer who does not make a profit should automatically be entitled to better treatment than an infringer who does make a profit is found nowhere in the law. The "not for profit" infringer is hardly entitled to special protection, which is why Congress conferred no such protection.

The Court's cap would set a new ceiling such that no copyright owner could effectively enforce their rights unless they could and did sue on numerous works. No copyright owner would be motivated to enforce its rights where it could only sue on a handful of works because the potential recovery would be too limited. Congress set a wide range of statutory damages for copyright cases precisely because plaintiffs need to be incentivized to bring appropriate cases to enforce their rights -- even those who own a small number of copyrights or those who only have a limited number of works infringed. Conversely, the Court's artificially depressed cap compels parties with a large number of copyrights at stake to sue on all of them, rather than a more modest number. This serves only to increase the discovery and trial burdens on parties and courts. Yet the Court's inflexible "three times" cap would invariably penalize plaintiffs with a small number of works at issue, and would force those with a lot of works to add to their complaints unnecessarily.

The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. Moreover, although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages