Court Greenlights Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Unmasking of Online Critic–In re DMCA Subpoena to Cloudflare

The Jehovah’s Witnesses (the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania) sought to unmask a Doe who uploaded an archive of religious texts, along with some associated linguistic parsing tools, to a website (https://jws-library.one). [That URL now says: “This site has been taken offline out of an abundance of caution while we review relevant matters.”] The Jehovah’s Witnesses submitted a 512(h) subpoena to Cloudflare, which provided cybersecurity (proxy) services to the website. Doe (represented by the EFF) and Cloudflare challenged the subpoena. The court is skeptical of Doe’s fair use defense, rejects the challenge to the subpoena, and greenlights the subpoena. The Court Ruling The court addresses Doe’s concerns via the “expectation of privacy” factor for considering subpoenas, which is a little tone deaf because there are other major social considerations at play beyond just privacy. In any case, those expectations of privacy depend on the case’s substantive merits, which…