A US court has ruled that Reddit should not reveal the identities of eight of its nine anonymous users who wrote comments in threads related to video piracy. A US District Court judge in the Northern District of California invoked the First Amendment, which protects citizens’ right to express themselves anonymously online. Interestingly, Reddit has nothing to do with the underlying case, a copyright infringement lawsuit pending in another federal court. A group of film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, has sued internet service provider RCN over its customers’ alleged downloads of 34 licensed films, including Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood and Killer Guard.

In an attempt to prove that RCN (rebranded as Astound Broadband in 2022) was turning a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the studios took Reddit to court. According to the plaintiffs, the platform should have provided them with identifying information about nine users who commented on piracy-related topics. Moreover, the earliest comments that interested film studios were made in 2009.

According to Ars Technica, the plaintiffs hoped to prove that RCN “ignores piracy on its network” by using information from Reddit commenters. The film studios claimed that they had no intention of “retaliating against these subscribers economically or officially. Rather, they simply want to discuss their comments.”

It is understood that the plaintiffs were trying to “pick on” one user’s comment that RCN sometimes remotely resets his modem. According to lawyers, this could mean that RCN is able to monitor and control the behavior of its customers, since the ability to reset the modem implies the ability to disable the modem. But in the judge’s eyes, this argument merely confirmed that the claimants could obtain the information they sought from the RCN itself. At the same time, there is no certainty that four of the nine individuals were RCN clients at all.

The trial continues from 2021. Previously, Reddit did reveal the identity of one of its users, ben125125, who mentioned RCN in his comments. The platform then came to the defense of the remaining eight people and refused to provide information about them. The plaintiffs then tried to force Reddit to comply with their demand through the courts. But a court overturned Reddit’s subpoena, ruling that the movie studios were seeking information that was irrelevant to the case.