Alaina Lancaster reports:
A Reddit user’s fight to remain anonymous will continue at a hearing in San Francisco federal court Thursday in a case that lawyers for the Jehovah’s Witnesses say presents a straightforward copyright infringement issue and a civil liberties group calls a sweeping attack on online free speech.
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, the administrative body behind the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion, subpoenaed social media platform Reddit in January to uncover the identity of a user who allegedly violated two of its copyrights in a subforum for former Jehovah’s Witnesses. After Reddit declined to respond to the subpoena, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the Northern District of California ruled that Reddit must reveal the identity of the user, but only to attorneys involved in the case.
In this week’s hearing, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which intervened on the anonymous user’s behalf, will get another chance to potentially quash the subpoena in front of U.S. District Judge James Donato.
Read more about the case on Law.com (free subscription required). You can find materials from EFF linked from EFF’s site.