In re Reddit — Grande Communications piracy unmasking subpoena denied (2023)

Shortly after their defeat in the RCN-related subpoena fight, the same group of film-production companies pursued another attempt to unmask Reddit users — this time in connection with a separate copyright suit against the internet service provider Grande Communications. The underlying litigation, After II Movie, LLC et al. v. Grande Communications Networks LLC (W.D. Tex.), concerned dozens of films the producers said Grande's subscribers had pirated.

The Reddit subpoena was docketed in the Northern District of California (No. 3:23-mc-80173-LB). As in the RCN matter, the producers did not seek to sue the Redditors; they wanted to identify six accounts whose comments referenced piracy, to bolster their argument that Grande knew its network was being used for infringement. Reddit again moved to quash, raising the same First Amendment objections to compelled unmasking of anonymous speakers.

On 29 July 2023, the court denied the motion to compel. The judge applied the established balancing test for unmasking anonymous online speakers and concluded that the producers had not made the heightened showing required, particularly given that the relevant evidence was available through the ISP itself rather than by stripping the anonymity of forum commenters. The result mirrored the RCN ruling almost exactly.

The Grande case is significant precisely because it was not a one-off. Taken together with the RCN matter and a later Frontier-related subpoena, it demonstrated that courts in the Northern District of California were consistently unwilling to let copyright plaintiffs use third-party subpoenas as a tool to unmask Reddit users whose only conduct was talking about piracy online. Reddit later characterized the repeated filings as an 'anti-piracy publicity campaign' and at one point sought tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

Observers in the copyright and digital-rights communities treated the cluster of rulings as a coherent body of authority: discussing infringement is protected speech, and the availability of alternative evidence weighs heavily against forcing a platform to identify its users. The repetition mattered, because a single quash order can be dismissed as fact-specific, whereas a pattern signals a more durable judicial stance.