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What the letter actually means
Working backward from the envelope in your hand, here is what has already happened:
- A lawsuit was filed. Strike 3 Holdings, LLC filed a complaint in a United States district court for copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. sections 106 and 501, naming as defendant "John Doe subscriber assigned IP address" followed by your address at the relevant time.
- A judge granted early discovery. Because the plaintiff cannot confer with an unknown defendant, it moved under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(d)(1) for leave to serve a subpoena on your ISP before the ordinary discovery conference. The court found good cause and granted it, in many districts with protective conditions attached.
- Your ISP was served and notified you. Federal law and the terms of most such orders require the provider to notify the affected subscriber and to wait a specified period before producing. That waiting period is why you are reading this now instead of after your name was already handed over.
You have not been sued by name. Your name is not on the public docket. Strike 3 does not know who you are. No judgment exists against you, no finding of liability has been made, and nothing has been proved. The plaintiff currently possesses one thing: an IP address.
The first 72 hours
- Write the deadline on your calendar. Find the date in the letter by which your provider will comply. Everything else is organized around that date.
- Preserve everything. The duty to preserve evidence attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated, and it is now. Do not wipe, reformat, factory reset, sell, trade in, or discard any computer, phone, tablet, router, or external drive. Do not uninstall software. Do not delete files, browser history, or accounts. Spoliation is the one mistake from which there is often no recovery.
- Do not contact Strike 3 or its counsel. Not to deny it, not to explain, not to ask questions. You would be speaking to experienced copyright litigation counsel whose objective is to obtain admissions. There is no version of that conversation that helps you.
- Do not call your ISP to argue. Your provider is complying with a court order. Its customer service representatives cannot intervene and are not your advocate. A call accomplishes nothing and may be logged.
- Stop any file sharing activity immediately. Monitoring in these cases is ongoing. Additional recorded activity after the notice adds works to the claim and makes willfulness materially easier to argue.
- Write down who had access. Privately, for your lawyer only. Everyone with access to the connection during the dates on Exhibit A: household members, guests, tenants, employees, contractors, neighbors. Note whether the network was password protected, whether the router used default credentials, whether a guest network existed, and whether anyone used a VPN.
- Do not discuss it by text or email. With family, roommates, or friends. Those communications are not privileged and are discoverable. Conversations with your lawyer are privileged from the first call.
- Call a lawyer who handles these cases. Not next month. The window in the letter is short and it does not extend.
Send us the notice
Forward the ISP letter and any attachments. We will identify the court, the case number, the assigned judge, the number of works asserted, and the operative deadline, and tell you what the realistic options are in that particular district. That review is confidential whether or not you retain the firm.
How much time you really have
Notice periods vary. Thirty days is common. Some courts have ordered providers to wait sixty days. Some notices arrive late in the window because of mail delay or because the letter went to an old address on the account.
Assume you have less time than the letter suggests. A lawyer needs time to pull the docket, read the early discovery motion and the order granting it, evaluate whether any pre-identification motion is realistically available in that district, and, if a filing is warranted, draft and file it before the production date. That is not a two day exercise.
It is not over, and it is not too late to retain counsel. Once your information has been produced, the plaintiff must still decide whether to name and serve you, and it must still prove its case if it does. What changes is the character of the work: the strategy shifts from preventing identification to managing what happens after it. Read the next stage in this guide, named and served.
Why this stage is your high water mark
Consider what each side holds today.
| What Strike 3 has | What Strike 3 does not have |
|---|---|
| An IP address and monitoring logs | Your name |
| Info hashes and timestamps on Exhibit A | Any evidence of who was at the keyboard |
| Copyright registrations for the asserted works | Any statement from you, in any form |
| Commercial geolocation placing the IP in the district | Access to your devices, your testimony, or discovery of any kind |
Every column on the right fills in as the case progresses. The plaintiff's identity evidence does not improve on its own, but its access to your evidence improves at every stage. That asymmetry is the entire reason experienced defense counsel treats the pre-identification window as the most valuable period in the case.
What counsel can actually do right now
- Pull and read the actual court file. The complaint, Exhibit A, the Rule 26(d)(1) motion and supporting declarations, the order granting it and any protective conditions it imposes, and the docket history of similar cases before the same judge. Much of what a defendant needs to know is in the file, and almost no unrepresented defendant reads it.
- Audit the registrations against the alleged dates. Under 17 U.S.C. section 412, statutory damages and attorney's fees are unavailable for infringement of an unpublished work commenced before registration, or of a published work commenced after first publication and before registration, unless registration was made within three months after first publication. A registration that post-dates the alleged conduct can materially change the exposure calculus for that work.
- Assess whether a motion to quash or for a protective order is advisable here. This is a district-specific and judge-specific judgment, not a reflex. In many districts these motions fail and can attract attention. In some, on the right facts, they are appropriate. Our page on motions to quash explains the standards, the standing problem, and the realistic odds.
- Seek leave to proceed anonymously and to seal identifying filings. Where anonymity is the client's priority, an early motion for a protective order permitting the defendant to litigate as a Doe is frequently a better instrument than a motion to quash. Some courts have built these protections into the early discovery order on their own initiative.
- Open a controlled dialogue with plaintiff's counsel. An appearance by defense counsel changes how the file is handled. Counsel can communicate that the subscriber denies the conduct, that the household had multiple users, or that a defect exists in the plaintiff's proof, without any statement being attributed to you and without your identity being disclosed to the plaintiff's principals.
- Where resolution is the right answer, negotiate it before identification. Cases resolved before the plaintiff has a name are ordinarily resolved on better terms, and the release can be structured so that the plaintiff never learns the client's identity from the firm.
What people get wrong at this stage
| The instinct | Why it backfires |
|---|---|
| "I will just explain that it was not me." | An unsworn denial to opposing counsel carries no evidentiary weight, waives nothing on their side, and hands them a recorded statement to test in discovery. Denials belong in a Rule 11 pleading. |
| "I will delete everything and there will be no proof." | The duty to preserve has already attached. Destruction is discoverable through forensic artifacts and metadata, and spoliation findings have driven six figure judgments in this line of cases. |
| "I will file a motion to quash myself, pro se." | Pro se filings in these cases routinely misstate the standing standard, are denied, and put the defendant's name into the public record in the process. That is the opposite of the goal. |
| "I will wait and see if anything happens." | Something will. The production date passes, the plaintiff obtains your identity, and you re-enter the case at the stage of least leverage and highest cost. |
| "I will hire the cheapest lawyer I can find." | A generalist unfamiliar with this docket can waive arguments and spend your money on filings that make things worse. Ask any lawyer directly how many BitTorrent copyright matters they have handled. |
What to expect after the deadline passes
If nothing is filed and the production date arrives, your provider produces your name and address. From there the paths diverge depending on which of Strike 3's counsel holds the file. Some wait for a defense lawyer to make contact. Some move promptly for leave to amend the complaint to name you personally and then serve you under Fed. R. Civ. P. 4, which must ordinarily be accomplished within 90 days of filing under Rule 4(m), subject to extensions the court has often granted in these cases.
You may also receive nothing at all for a period of months. Silence is not resolution. The case remains pending, and the plaintiff retains the option to name you within the limitations period, which for civil copyright claims is three years from accrual under 17 U.S.C. section 507(b).