Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-12-07135/USCOURTS-caDC-12-07135-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 820
Nature of Suit: Copyright
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued April 14, 2014 Decided May 27, 2014

No. 12-7135

AF HOLDINGS, LLC,

APPELLEE

v.

DOES 1 – 1058,

APPELLEES

COX COMMUNICATIONS, INC., ET AL.,

APPELLANTS

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:12-cv-00048)

Benjamin J. Fox argued the cause for appellants. With 

him on the briefs were Deanne E. Maynard, Bart W. Huffman, 

Hugh S. Balsam, John D. Seiver, Ronald G. London, Leslie G. 

Moylan, and Lisa B. Zycherman. Marc A. Hearron entered an 

appearance.

Corynne McSherry argued the cause for amici curiae 

Electronic Frontier Foundation, et al. in support of appellants.

On the brief were Mitchell L. Stoltz, Arthur B. Spitzer, 

Catherine Crump, and Paul Alan Levy.

USCA Case #12-7135 Document #1494480 Filed: 05/27/2014 Page 1 of 16
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Paul A. Duffy argued the cause and filed the brief for 

appellee AF Holdings, LLC.

Before: TATEL, Circuit Judge, and SILBERMAN and 

SENTELLE, Senior Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge TATEL.

TATEL, Circuit Judge: Generally speaking, our federal 

judicial system and the procedural rules that govern it work 

well, allowing parties to resolve their disputes with one 

another fairly and efficiently. But sometimes individuals seek 

to manipulate judicial procedures to serve their own improper

ends. This case calls upon us to evaluate—and put a stop to—

one litigant’s attempt to do just that.

I.

Appellee AF Holdings, a limited liability company 

formed in the Caribbean islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis, sued 

and then sought discovery regarding more than a thousand

unknown individuals who it claimed had illegally shared a 

copyrighted pornographic film. This interlocutory appeal 

arises from a district court order granting AF Holdings’s 

discovery requests.

A full understanding of this case requires knowing some 

things about the lawyer and “law firm” that initiated it. AF 

Holdings is represented by attorney Paul A. Duffy. Until very 

recently, Duffy was associated with “Prenda Law,” an 

organization that, since representing AF Holdings in the 

district court, appears to have disbanded and then 

reconstituted itself in a similar form. See Ben Jones, Prenda 

Suffers More Fee Award Blows, TorrentFreak (August 9, 

2013), http://torrentfreak.com/prenda-suffers-more-fee-award

-blows-130809. 

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Prenda Law, as Judge Otis Wright II put it in a case 

similar to this, was a “porno-trolling collective.” Ingenuity 13 

LLC v. John Doe, No. 2:12-cv-8333, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 

64564, at *3 (C.D. Cal. May 6, 2013). According to Judge 

Wright, Duffy and the other principals of Prenda Law were

“attorneys with shattered law practices” who, “[s]eeking easy 

money, . . . formed . . . AF Holdings,” acquired “several 

copyrights to pornographic movies,” then initiated massive 

“John Doe” copyright infringement lawsuits. Id. at *5–6.

These suits took advantage of judicial discovery procedures in 

order to identify persons who might possibly have 

downloaded certain pornographic films. Such individuals, 

although generally able to use the Internet anonymously, are, 

like all Internet users, linked to particular Internet Protocol 

(IP) addresses, a series of numbers assigned to each Internet 

service subscriber. Internet service providers like Appellants

can use IP addresses to identify these underlying subscribers, 

but not necessarily the individuals actually accessing the 

Internet through the subscribers’ connections at any given 

time. Confronted with these realities, Prenda Law’s general 

approach was to identify certain unknown persons whose IP 

addresses were used to download pornographic films, sue 

them in gigantic multi-defendant suits that minimized filing 

fees, discover the identities of the persons to whom these IP 

address were assigned by serving subpoenas on the Internet 

service providers to which the addresses pertained, then 

negotiate settlements with the underlying subscribers—a 

“strategy [that] was highly successful because of statutorycopyright damages, the pornographic subject matter, and the 

high cost of litigation.” Id. at *6–7; see also Claire Suddath, 

Prenda Law, the Porn Copyright Trolls, Bloomberg 

Businessweek (May 30, 2013), http://www.businessweek.com

/articles/2013-05-30/prenda-law-the-porn-copyright-trolls 

(recounting Prenda Law’s history and litigation tactics). If an 

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identified defendant sought to actually litigate, Prenda Law

would simply dismiss the case. See Ingenuity 13 LLC, 2013 

U.S. Dist. LEXIS 64564, at *6–7. As Duffy acknowledged at 

oral argument, of the more than one hundred cases that AF 

Holdings has initiated, none has proceeded to trial or resulted 

in any judgment in its favor other than by default. Oral Arg. 

Rec. 30:09–20. Nevertheless, according to one article, Prenda

Law made around $15 million in a little less than three years.

See Kashmir Hill, How Porn Copyright Lawyer John Steel 

Has Made a ‘Few Million Dollars’ Pursuing (Sometimes 

Innocent) ‘Porn Pirates’, Forbes (Oct. 15, 2012),

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/10/15/howporn-copyright-lawyer-john-steele-justifies-his-pursuit-ofsometimes-innocent-porn-pirates.

The present lawsuit is a quintessential example of Prenda 

Law’s modus operandi. Represented by Prenda Law, AF 

Holdings brought suit in the United States District Court for 

the District of Columbia against 1,058 unnamed Does who it 

alleged had illegally downloaded and shared the pornographic 

film Popular Demand using a file-sharing service known as 

BitTorrent. As an attachment to its complaint, AF Holdings 

listed the 1,058 IP addresses assigned to those subscribers 

whose Internet connections had been used to share Popular 

Demand, along with the specific date and time at which it,

using what it described as “sophisticated and proprietary peerto-peer network forensic software,” had observed each 

defendant’s allegedly infringing activity. AF Holdings also 

attached the purported assignment agreement through which it 

claims to have acquired the copyright to Popular Demand.

Although it has no effect on our resolution of this appeal, 

other courts have since concluded that at least one of the 

signatures on this document was forged. See Ingenuity 13 

LLC, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 64564, at *8; AF Holdings LLC 

v. Navasca, No. C-12-2396, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 102249, 

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at *3–4 (N.D. Cal. July 22, 2013); AF Holdings, LLC v. 

Doe(s), No. 12-1445, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 187458, at *10–

12 (D. Minn. Nov. 6, 2013), vacated by AF Holdings, LLC v. 

Doe, No. 12-1445, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 43318 (D. Minn. 

Mar. 27, 2014); see also Lightspeed Media Corp. v. Smith, 

No. 12-889, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 168615, at *16 (S.D. Ill. 

Nov. 27, 2013) (“The[ principals of Prenda] have shown a 

relentless willingness to lie to the Court on paper and in 

person, despite being on notice that they were facing 

sanctions in this Court, being sanctioned by other courts, and 

being referred to state and federal bars, the United States 

Attorney in at least two districts, one state Attorney General, 

and the Internal Revenue Service.” (internal citations 

omitted)).

Moving for leave to take immediate discovery, AF 

Holdings then sought to serve subpoenas on the five Internet 

service providers linked to the 1,058 IP addresses it had 

identified: Cox Communications, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, 

and Bright House Networks. The district court granted the 

motion, authorizing the issuance of subpoenas compelling 

these providers to turn over the names, addresses, telephone 

numbers, and email addresses of the underlying subscribers. 

The providers refused to comply. Invoking Federal Rule 

of Civil Procedure 45(d)(3)(A), which provides that a district 

court “must quash or modify a subpoena that . . . subjects a 

person to undue burden,” they asserted that the administrative 

expense involved was necessarily an “undue burden” because 

AF Holdings had failed to establish that the court would have 

personal jurisdiction over the defendants or that venue would 

lie in this district. Supporting these contentions, Verizon

asserted that its preliminary investigation revealed that only 

20 of the 188 Verizon subscribers whose information AF 

Holdings sought resided in the District of Columbia. Comcast 

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reported that only one of the 400 Comcast subscribers AF 

Holdings identified appeared to live in the District. And Cox, 

AT&T, and Bright House each stated that they had no 

subscribers at all in the District of Columbia; indeed, they do 

not even offer service here. The providers also argued that 

any burden was necessarily undue because AF Holdings had 

failed to provide any reason to think that joinder of these

1,058 defendants in one action was proper.

The district court rejected these arguments, holding that 

“considerations of personal jurisdiction and joinder are 

premature when discovery is sought before the plaintiff has 

named a defendant and the discovery is targeted to identify 

unknown individuals associated with the IP addresses.” But

acknowledging that several other district courts had reached 

contrary conclusions in similar situations, and recognizing

that a substantial ground for difference of opinion existed, the 

district court certified its order for immediate appeal. See 28 

U.S.C. § 1292(b). 

The providers now reiterate the arguments they made in 

the district court—that the subpoenas are unduly burdensome 

because venue is improper, personal jurisdiction over these 

Doe defendants is lacking, and the defendants could not 

properly be joined together in one action. Our review is for 

abuse of discretion. See Recording Industry Ass’n of America, 

Inc. v. Verizon Internet Services, 351 F.3d 1229, 1233 (D.C. 

Cir. 2003). As a “district court by definition abuses its 

discretion when it makes an error of law,” the “abuse-ofdiscretion standard includes review to determine that the 

discretion was not guided by erroneous legal conclusions.” 

Koon v. United States, 518 U.S. 81, 100 (1996).

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II.

We begin with personal jurisdiction, along with the 

closely related question of venue. Defending the district 

court’s decision, AF Holdings contends that any consideration 

of such issues is premature where, as here, the as-yetunknown defendants have yet to raise these defenses. It relies 

primarily on Anger v. Revco Drug Co., 791 F.2d 956 (D.C. 

Cir. 1986), in which we reiterated the general rule that 

“personal jurisdiction is a matter to be raised by motion or 

responsive pleading.” Id. at 958.

In Anger, however, we faced a situation very different 

from the one we confront here. There, we considered a district 

court’s sua sponte dismissal of a complaint for lack of 

personal jurisdiction. We held that such a dismissal is 

improper because “before the complaint has been served and 

a response received, the court is not positioned to determine 

conclusively whether personal jurisdiction exists.” Id.

(emphasis added). In other words, to bring an action a 

plaintiff has no obligation to establish personal jurisdiction 

until the defendant has raised that defense. See id.; accord, 

e.g., Caribbean Broadcasting System, Ltd. v. Cable & 

Wireless PLC, 148 F.3d 1080, 1090 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (CBS) 

(“CBS’s obligation to make some allegations relating to 

personal jurisdiction arose . . . only after CCC had filed its 

motion to dismiss . . . .”).

Different principles apply where, as here, a plaintiff seeks

not just to file a complaint, but instead attempts to use the 

machinery of the courts to force a party to comply with its 

discovery demands. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 45 and 

26 set forth the relevant considerations. Rule 45(d)(3)(A) 

requires a district court to “quash or modify a subpoena that 

. . . subjects a person to undue burden.” If a subpoena compels 

disclosure of information that is not properly discoverable, 

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then the burden it imposes, however slight, is necessarily 

undue: why require a party to produce information the 

requesting party has no right to obtain? The question then 

becomes what sort of information is properly discoverable. 

Where, again as here, no party has yet been specifically 

named as a defendant, the only potential avenue for discovery 

is Rule 26(d)(1), which provides for discovery “by court 

order.” A district court’s discretion to order discovery in these 

circumstances is, in turn, cabined by Rule 26(b)(1)’s general 

requirements that a discovery order be “[f]or good cause” and 

relate to a “matter relevant to the subject matter involved in 

the action.” See Food Lion v. United Food & Commercial 

Workers Union, 103 F.3d 1007, 1012 (D.C. Cir. 1997) (“[N]o 

one would suggest that discovery should be allowed of 

information that has no conceivable bearing on the case.”

(internal quotation marks omitted)). 

The limits of the federal discovery procedures are

illustrated by Oppenheimer Fund, Inc. v. Sanders, 437 U.S. 

340 (1978), in which the Supreme Court held that the 

representative plaintiffs in a class action suit could not use

discovery tools to secure from the defendant the names of 

members of the plaintiff class. Id. at 353. The Court 

concluded that because the plaintiffs did “not seek this 

information for any bearing that it might have on issues in the 

case,” but instead simply in order to provide the class 

members with notice of the litigation, they lacked a proper 

discovery purpose. Id. at 352. It inferred this improper motive 

in part from the plaintiffs’ conduct in the district court, where

they had offered to redefine the class to encompass only those 

class members to whom they could already send notice. See

id. at 353. In a footnote, the Court emphasized—in language 

especially relevant here—that “when the purpose of a 

discovery request is to gather information for use in 

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proceedings other than the pending suit, discovery properly is 

denied.” Id. at 352 n.17.

Applying these same principles, we conclude that, as is 

the case when a plaintiff seeks jurisdictional discovery with 

respect to named defendants, a plaintiff pursuing discovery of 

the sort AF Holdings seeks regarding unknown defendants 

must “have at least a good faith belief that such discovery will 

enable it to show that the court has personal jurisdiction over 

the defendant[s].” CBS, 148 F.3d at 1090. Absent such a

threshold showing, there is little reason to believe that the 

information sought will be “relevant to the subject matter 

involved in the action,” as Rule 26(b)(1) requires. The 

identity of prospective defendants who cannot properly be 

sued in this district can be of little use in a lawsuit brought in 

this district. And again, as the Court stated in Oppenheimer, 

“when the purpose of a discovery request is to gather 

information for use in proceedings other than the pending 

suit, discovery properly is denied.” 437 U.S. at 352 n.17 

(emphasis added). Thus, in denying discovery where there is 

no such good faith belief, a court would not be making an

impermissible “conclusive[]” determination on the merits of 

the personal jurisdiction question. Anger, 791 F.2d at 958. 

Instead, the court would be satisfying its Rule 26 obligation to 

ensure that the scope of discovery is limited to issues actually 

relevant to the litigation. 

Here, we think it quite obvious that AF Holdings could 

not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could

successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John 

Doe defendants in this district. AF Holdings concedes that 

under the District of Columbia’s long-arm statute, which

along with the Due Process Clause governs this question, see

GTE New Media Services Inc. v. Bellsouth Corp., 199 F.3d 

1343, 1347 (D.C. Cir. 2000), the only conceivable way that 

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personal jurisdiction might properly be exercised over these 

Doe defendants is if they are residents of the District of 

Columbia or at least downloaded the copyrighted work in the 

District. See D.C. Code § 13-423(3), (4) (providing for 

personal jurisdiction over a person “causing tortious injury in 

the District of Columbia”); Nu Image, Inc. v. Does 1–23,322, 

799 F. Supp. 2d 34, 38–40 (D.D.C. 2011). But AF Holdings 

has made absolutely no effort to limit its suit or its discovery 

efforts to those defendants who might live or have 

downloaded Popular Demand in the District of Columbia. 

Instead, it sought to subpoena Internet service providers that 

provide no service at all in the District. As Duffy reluctantly

conceded at oral argument, AF Holdings could have no 

legitimate reason for objecting to the court’s quashing the 

subpoenas directed at these providers. Oral Arg. Rec. 33:00–

04. Even for those providers that do serve the District of 

Columbia, AF Holdings’s discovery demands were overbroad

because it made no attempt to limit its inquiry to those 

subscribers who might actually be located in the District. It 

could have easily done so using what are known as 

geolocation services, which enable anyone to estimate the 

location of Internet users based on their IP addresses. Such 

services cost very little or are even free. See Amicus Br. of

Electronic Frontier Foundation, et al. 24 (observing that 

“Neustar IP Intelligence . . . provides on-demand geolocation 

services for $8 per 1,000 addresses); see also 

http://freegeoip.net (last visited May 22, 2014) (providing this 

service for free). While perhaps not precise enough to identify 

an Internet user’s street address, these services “can be 

accurate,” as Duffy acknowledged at oral argument, Oral Arg. 

Rec. 23:58–24:01—certainly sufficiently accurate to provide 

at least some basis for determining whether a particular

subscriber might live in the District of Columbia rather than, 

say, Oregon, see Nu Image, 799 F. Supp. 2d at 41 (“while 

these geolocation services are not 100% accurate, these 

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services can place a user no farther away than a city that 

borders the user’s actual location”). Given AF Holdings’s

failure to take even these minimal steps, we cannot escape the 

conclusion that it sought the vast majority of this information 

for reasons unrelated to its pursuit of this particular lawsuit. 

See Oppenheimer, 437 U.S. at 352 n.17 (“In deciding whether 

a request comes within the discovery rules, a court is not 

required to blind itself to the purpose for which a party seeks 

information.”). Indeed, Duffy essentially admitted as much at 

oral argument, stating that if, as appears to be the case, 399 of 

Comcast’s 400 identified subscribers were found to live 

outside the District, “the 399 likely wouldn’t be named as 

defendants in this case.” Oral Arg. Rec. 34:32–36.

The foregoing analysis applies equally to venue. Under 

the relevant statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a), the propriety of 

venue turns on whether the defendant is subject to personal 

jurisdiction. See Milwaukee Concrete Studios, Ltd. v. Fjeld 

Manufacturing Co., 8 F.3d 441, 445 (7th Cir. 1993) (“section 

1400(a)’s ‘may be found’ clause has been interpreted to mean 

that a defendant is amenable to personal jurisdiction in a 

particular forum”). AF Holdings’s failure to establish any 

basis for thinking the latter exists means that it has likewise 

failed to set forth any good faith basis for the former.

AF Holdings’s sole counterargument is that personal 

jurisdiction and venue may be waived and that these 

defendants, once identified, might do so. See Anger, 791 F.2d 

at 958. Such a speculative possibility is, however, plainly

insufficient to satisfy AF Holdings’s obligation to 

demonstrate a good faith belief that it will actually be able to 

successfully sue the more than a thousand non-District 

residents about whom it seeks discovery. As then-District

Judge Robert Wilkins concluded in rejecting the same 

argument, “it defies common sense for the Court to assume 

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that all of the nonresident John Does will waive viable lack of 

venue and lack of personal jurisdiction defenses—indeed, 

those defenses have been routinely raised in other similar file 

sharing lawsuits.” Nu Image, 799 F. Supp. 2d at 42; see also, 

e.g., AF Holdings LLC v. Does 1–96, No. C-11-03335, 2011 

U.S. Dist. LEXIS 134655, at *9 (N.D. Cal. 2011) (providing 

for discovery only after holding that plaintiff had “made a 

prima facie showing that its Complaint would withstand a 

motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction”); 

Millenium TGA v. Doe, No. 10-C-5603, 2011 U.S. Dist. 

LEXIS 110135, at *8 (N.D. Ill. 2011) (refusing to allow 

discovery where there was no plausible basis for personal 

jurisdiction); cf. McLaughlin v. Bradlee, 803 F.2d 1197, 1205 

(D.C. Cir. 1986) (upholding award of sanctions where 

defendants’ issue preclusion defenses were sufficiently 

obvious to render complaint frivolous).

In sum, AF Holdings’s refusal to cabin its suit and 

corresponding discovery requests to individuals whom it has

some realistic chance of successfully suing in this district 

demonstrates that it has not “sought the information because 

of its relevance to the issues” that might actually be litigated 

here. Oppenheimer, 437 U.S. at 353. Although AF Holdings 

might possibly seek discovery regarding individual 

defendants in the judicial districts in which they are likely

located, what it certainly “may not do . . . is improperly use 

court processes by attempting to gain information about 

hundreds of IP addresses located all over the country in a 

single action, especially when many of those addresses fall 

outside of the court’s jurisdiction.” Pacific Century 

International, Ltd. v. Does 1–37, 282 F.R.D. 189, 196 (N.D. 

Ill. 2012). In seeking such information, AF Holdings clearly 

abused the discovery process.

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III.

We turn to the question of joinder, which provides a 

separate and independent ground for reversal. As relevant 

here, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20(a)(2) sets forth that 

multiple defendants may be joined in one action if the 

plaintiff seeks relief “with respect to or arising out of the 

same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or 

occurrences” and “any question of law or fact common to all 

defendants will arise in the action.” In a multi-Doe copyright 

infringement lawsuit such as this, at least one issue of law or 

fact will generally be common to all defendants—here, that 

issue might be whether AF Holdings has a valid copyright in 

Popular Demand. But whether all of these Doe defendants 

could possibly have been a part of the same “transaction, 

occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences” so as to 

support joinder is a more difficult question. If a plaintiff such 

as AF Holdings can claim no good faith belief that all the Doe 

defendants are linked in this way, then the logic for denying 

or at least limiting discovery is the same as that delineated 

above with respect to personal jurisdiction and venue: 

information about individuals who could not be joined in an 

action cannot possibly be “relevant to the subject matter 

involved in the action.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1).

According to AF Holdings, joinder of the 1,058 John 

Does it named in the underlying suit was at least 

presumptively proper because, given the properties of the 

BitTorrent file-sharing protocol the defendants allegedly used 

to download Popular Demand, each defendant was 

necessarily part of the same transaction or series of 

transactions. Some background on the nature of BitTorrent is 

necessary to understand this argument. As Judge Harold Baer, 

considering a case very much like this one, explained:

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Simplified, BitTorrent and similar protocols break a 

large file into pieces while tagging each piece with a 

common identifier. Where in the normal course a 

user would download a file from a single source, and 

download it sequentially from beginning to end, with 

the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, users join 

forces to simultaneously download and upload pieces 

of the file from and to each other. This reduces the 

bottleneck of Internet traffic that normally occurs at 

the server where the entire file is located and allows 

for faster download speeds for users. This 

interconnected web of information flowing between 

users, or peers, is called a swarm.

Media Products, Inc. v. Does 1–26, No. 12 Civ. 3719, 2012 

U.S. Dist. LEXIS 125366, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 3, 2012). AF 

Holdings argues that because BitTorrent users who download 

the same file are part of the same “swarm,” they have all 

participated in the same series of transactions. See, e.g., 

Digital Sin, Inc. v. Does 1–176, 279 F.R.D. 239, 244 

(S.D.N.Y. 2012) (accepting a version of this argument).

We are unconvinced. For purposes of this case, we may 

assume that two individuals who participate in the same 

swarm at the same time are part of the same series of 

transactions within the meaning of Rule 20(a)(2). In that 

circumstance, the individuals might well be actively sharing a

file with one another, uploading and downloading pieces of 

the copyrighted work from the other members of the swarm. 

But AF Holdings has provided no reason to think that the 

Doe defendants it named in this lawsuit were ever 

participating in the same swarm at the same time. Instead, it 

has simply set forth snapshots of a precise moment in which 

each of these 1,058 Does allegedly shared the copyrighted 

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work—snapshots that span a period of nearly five months. 

Two individuals who downloaded the same file five months 

apart are exceedingly unlikely to have had any interaction 

with one another whatsoever. Their only relationship is that 

they used the same protocol to access the same work. To 

paraphrase an analogy offered by amicus counsel at oral 

argument, two BitTorrent users who download the same file 

months apart are like two individuals who play at the same 

blackjack table at different times. They may have won the 

same amount of money, employed the same strategy, and 

perhaps even played with the same dealer, but they have still 

engaged in entirely separate transactions. And “[s]imply 

committing the same type of violation in the same way does 

not link defendants together for the purposes of joinder.” 

Hard Drive Productions, Inc. v. Does 1–30, No. 2:11cv345, 

2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 119333, at *7 (E.D. Va. 2011) 

(internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore agree with 

those district courts that have concluded that the mere fact 

that two defendants accessed the same file through BitTorrent 

provides an insufficient basis for joinder. See Malibu Media 

LLC, 286 F.R.D. 113, 116 (D.D.C. 2012) (“‘Nothing in the 

complaint negates the inference that the downloads by the 

various [Doe] defendants were discrete and separate acts that 

took place at different times.’”) (quoting Digital Sins, Inc. v. 

Does 1–245, No. 11 Civ. 8170, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 

69286, at *6 (S.D.N.Y. 2012)); accord, e.g., Patrick Collins, 

Inc. v. Does 1–44, No. 8:12-cv-00020, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 

47686, at *18 (D. Md. Apr. 4, 2012) (“A majority of courts 

. . . have specifically held that the properties of BitTorrent are 

insufficient to support joinder.”); In re BitTorrent Adult Film 

Copyright Infringement Cases, 296 F.R.D. 80, 90–91 

(E.D.N.Y. 2012).

As with personal jurisdiction and venue, AF Holdings 

could have brought a suit for which it had some reasonable

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basis for believing that the requirements for joinder would be 

satisfied. But given its decision to instead name and seek 

discovery regarding a vast number of defendants who 

downloaded the film weeks and even months apart—

defendants who could not possibly remain joined in this 

litigation—one can easily infer that its purpose was to attain 

information that was not, and could not be, relevant to this 

particular suit. Such use of the discovery procedures is 

prohibited.

IV.

Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s order and 

remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. 

We leave it to the district court to determine what sanctions, if 

any, are warranted for AF Holdings’s use of a possible 

forgery in support of its claim.

So ordered.

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