Indigital Solutions, LLC v. Mohammed, 2012 WL 5825824 (S.D.Tex. November 15, 2012)
Plaintiffs alleged that one or more unknown defendants used malware to gain access to plaintiffs’ email account, web hosting account and domain registration account. From a message in plaintiffs’ email account, the defendants acquired an image of one of the plaintiff’s signature, which defendants used to forge a domain name transfer agreement. Plaintiffs sued under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other theories. They sought leave to take expedited discovery to learn the identity of the unknown defendants. The court granted the motion.
The court found that plaintiffs had made a prima facie showing of harm by setting forth a valid claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The discovery request was specific, in that they sought third party subpoenas to specified recipients seeking particular information. All alternative means of discovering the defendants had been exhausted, and the case could not move forward without the information. And the court found no privacy interest on the part of the defendants to be at stake, especially given the evidence that the defendants were not U.S. citizens, thus not subject to any First Amendment interest in anonymity.
November 21, 2012
It should be interesting to see how cases like this and the recent attack on bit torrent sites turns out.