Thanks for that link, Henri.

A recent ruling denied the RIAA’s motion, which they filed against the University of New Mexico to disclose the identities of 16 student internet users.

Of particular, and perhaps paralleled, interest in the decision is the court’s statement in response to the RIAA’s claim that responsive documents are required immediately to stop irreparable harm:

“While the Court does not dispute that infringement of a copyright results in harm, it requires a Coleridgian “suspension of disbelief” to accept that the harm is irreparable, especially when monetary damages can cure any alleged violation.”

More here, courtesy of Ray Beckerman’s site:
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/…discovery-application.html

SJ seems like an awfully high bar to me, given that it’s going to be nearly impossible to gather evidence without a defendant.

The balancing test that the court has to do is between the defendant’s First Amendment right to speak freely, and the plaintiff’s right to seek redress. Courts such as the Delaware supreme court have balanced these interests using the summary judgment standard. See, for example, Doe v. Cahill, which I have written about here: http://www.internetcases.com/archives/2005/10/delaware_decisi.html

In this case, the plaintiff isn’t going in suing randomly, he knows who the person is, he’s making a legitimate case against him, but he also needs to get all of the information to properly have due justice. The plaintiff needs their day in court as much as the defendant.

You know if “local governance” was government sanctioned, disputes could be settled without having to go through all the steps of formal courts. There could be many instances of resident-to-resident disputes where neither party is particularly interested or simply doesn’t needs to know the identity of the other party. There would be no need to seek subpoenas and go through this proposal’s steps in those cases, hence making costs lower.

I’m sure you’ve already thought of all of that quite a bit, though from what I can tell, the suggestion is to make it voluntary with incentives to join. Perhaps because it’s the most viable solution as it is…. Oh well, if it were government sanctioned, it could act to supplement the courts, perhaps tie-in financial/personal information in the back-end for judgment enforcements and the like, but not require private and/or irrelevant information ever to be forced into the public record on purpose or by accident. For bloggers/residents, losing an identity can be an enormous deal.

the real person exists outside of the United States, and there is variance on policy procedure?