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Under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(a)(1)(A)(i), a defendant served with a summons and complaint must serve an answer within 21 days after being served. If you timely waived service under Rule 4(d), the period is 60 days from the date the request was sent. A timely Rule 12 motion alters the schedule under Rule 12(a)(4). Count the days from the date of service, confirm the local rules of the district, and treat the date as immovable.
The 21-day clock
Nothing else on this page matters if you miss this deadline. Twenty-one days is short. It includes weekends. It does not pause because you are gathering money for a retainer or because you are hoping the matter resolves itself.
If you cannot retain counsel inside the window, a lawyer can frequently obtain a stipulated extension from plaintiff's counsel or a short extension from the court. But someone has to ask, and the asking has to happen before the deadline runs, not after.
What changes the moment you are served
| Before service | After service | |
|---|---|---|
| Your identity | Known only to your ISP | Known to the plaintiff and, absent a sealing order, on the public docket |
| Deadlines | The ISP production date | Rule 12 response, then a scheduling order, discovery cutoffs, and dispositive motion dates |
| Plaintiff's tools | A third party subpoena | Interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, forensic inspection demands, and your deposition |
| Your obligations | Preserve evidence | Preserve evidence, respond to discovery under oath, appear for deposition, comply with the court's orders |
| Cost of doing nothing | Loss of anonymity | Default judgment, enforceable by wage garnishment, bank levy, and judgment liens |
Strike 3 still bears the burden of proving, by a preponderance of the evidence, that you personally committed the infringement. Being named does not make you liable, and it does not make the plaintiff's identity evidence any better than it was the day before. Under Cobbler Nevada, LLC v. Gonzales, 901 F.3d 1142 (9th Cir. 2018), subscriber status alone does not even state a claim.
What a default judgment actually means
If you do not respond, the plaintiff may seek entry of default under Fed. R. Civ. P. 55(a) and then a default judgment under Rule 55(b). In a copyright case where the works were timely registered, that judgment can include statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. section 504(c) for each work, plus costs and a reasonable attorney's fee under section 505, plus injunctive relief.
A federal money judgment is not a letter. It is a public record, generally enforceable for many years and renewable, and it can be executed through wage garnishment, bank account levy, and liens on real property, subject to state exemption law. Setting a default aside under Rule 55(c) or Rule 60(b) requires a showing of good cause or excusable neglect, and "I hoped it would go away" is neither.
Your procedural options for responding
- Answer the complaint. Admit, deny, or state a lack of knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to each allegation, and plead affirmative defenses. An answer preserves your defenses, puts the plaintiff to its proof, and has a strategic consequence worth understanding: once you serve an answer or a motion for summary judgment, whichever comes first, the plaintiff can no longer dismiss unilaterally under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i). It needs your written stipulation or a court order. That materially changes the negotiating posture.
- Move to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6). Where the complaint pleads nothing beyond subscriber status to connect you to the conduct, Cobbler Nevada, Twombly, and Iqbal supply the framework. Whether the motion is worth filing depends on the circuit, the judge, and exactly how the amended complaint is worded.
- Move under Rule 12(b)(2) or 12(b)(3) where jurisdiction or venue is genuinely doubtful. Commercial geolocation is probabilistic. If the IP address was not in fact assigned in the district, or you were not, that is a threshold issue.
- Counterclaim, in the rare case that supports one. Declaratory relief or, on strong facts, other theories. These require careful evaluation. A weak counterclaim invites a fee exposure of its own.
- Negotiate a resolution before the answer is due. There is a genuine window between service and the Rule 12 deadline in which many of these matters resolve. See settle or litigate.
You have 21 days. Use several of them well.
Send us the summons, the amended complaint, and Exhibit A. We will confirm the exact response deadline under the local rules of that district, tell you what the plaintiff has actually pleaded against you, and lay out the options with costs attached.
Discovery, and the plaintiff's real objective
Here is the part that is not obvious from the outside. The plaintiff's monitoring software cannot identify a person. It never could. What it can do is place an internet connection in a swarm. To convert that into liability, the plaintiff needs evidence about a human being, and after service it has a lawful mechanism for getting it: discovery directed at you.
Expect some combination of the following:
- Interrogatories asking who lives at the residence, who had network access, what devices exist, what file sharing software has ever been installed, and whether you have ever used BitTorrent.
- Requests for production of router configurations and logs, device inventories, ISP account records, and, in some cases, demands for forensic imaging of computers and phones.
- Requests for admission under Rule 36, which are dangerous precisely because an unanswered request is deemed admitted.
- Your deposition, under oath, on the record. This is the objective. A single affirmative answer to a question such as whether you have ever used a file sharing program to obtain adult films can supply the element the plaintiff cannot otherwise prove.
If you did not do it, discovery is survivable and often clarifying, and the case frequently becomes a candidate for summary judgment once the plaintiff has exhausted its tools and still cannot connect you to the conduct. If you did do it, litigating toward a deposition is usually the worst available path, because the plaintiff obtains from your own mouth the evidence its software could never generate. This is why an honest and privileged conversation with your lawyer, early, is worth more than any motion.
Can you still protect your name?
Partially, and it depends on timing and on the court. Federal practice strongly favors public proceedings, and Fed. R. Civ. P. 10(a) requires the title of the complaint to name all parties. Courts nonetheless permit litigation under a pseudonym in appropriate circumstances, and a number of judges handling these cases have granted defendants leave to proceed anonymously and ordered identifying filings sealed, sometimes on their own initiative as a condition of early discovery.
A motion for a protective order under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(c) and for leave to proceed under a pseudonym is best filed early, ideally before or at the time of the first responsive filing. Once your name has circulated on a public docket, the practical value of sealing declines even if the motion succeeds.
Is it too late to resolve the claim?
No. These matters resolve at every stage, including after service, after an answer, and occasionally after summary judgment briefing. What changes is leverage and cost. Before identification, the plaintiff has no defendant. After service, it has a named defendant, sunk costs, and discovery tools. After a deposition in which admissions were made, its position is stronger still.
The corollary is also true and is often overlooked: leverage can move in your direction as well. An answer on file, a well supported Rule 12 motion, targeted discovery aimed at the PCAP files and the monitoring methodology, and a credible willingness to seek fees under 17 U.S.C. section 505 all change the arithmetic for a plaintiff whose model depends on volume and speed. Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 579 U.S. 197 (2016), directs courts to give substantial weight to the objective reasonableness of the losing party's litigating position, which is not a comfortable standard for a plaintiff pursuing a defendant it cannot identify.