13
Il.
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
Does it named in
presumptively proper
BitTorrent file-sharing
to
download
necessarily
transactions.
necessary to
considering
Holdings, joinder of the 1,058 John
the underlying suit was at least
because, given the properties of the
protocol the defendants allegedly used
Popular
Demand,
each
defendant
was
part of the same transaction or series of
Some background on the nature of BitTorrent is
understand this argument. As Judge Harold Baer,
a case very much like this one, explained:
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