Twitter Beats Subpoena Seeking to Reveal Anonymous Troll

Twitter Inc. on Tuesday won the latest round in its battle to block a subpoena seeking to unmask an anonymous user who posted copyrighted photos of women in tweets targeting the private equity billionaire Brian Sheth.

US District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the subpoena petitioner, Bayside Advisory LLC, couldn’t make a viable copyright infringement claim because the six tweets at issue, which were posted by the account @CallMeMoneyBags in October 2020, were protected by fair use.

Bayside’s managing member, Bert Kaufman, said in a statement to Bloomberg Law that the company is disappointed with the ruling and evaluating options for a lawsuit against the anonymous user and an appeal.

Bayside, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm, registered the copyrights of the six photos after asking Twitter to remove them in 2020. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows copyright holders to subpoena online services to obtain the identity of infringers.

The judge, writing for the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said there were still major unanswered questions about the nature of Bayside’s business, why it wanted to unmask the Twitter user and its potential connections to Sheth, the co-founder of Austin-based Vista Equity.

“The Court is left scratching its head,” Chhabria’s 15-page ruling said. “It is not clear what Bayside has to gain from pursuing a copyright action against MoneyBags.”

Chhabria said it would have been helpful to insist on an evidentiary hearing to examine “whether Bayside and its counsel are abusing the judicial process in an effort to discover MoneyBags’s identity for reasons having nothing to do with copyright law.”

However, both parties asked at a hearing last month that the case be adjudicated based on the current record, he said.

Even if Bayside were able to make a viable copyright infringement claim, Chhabria said the mystery behind the company meant he would still block the subpoena “in a heartbeat.”

Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro LLP represent Bayside. Perkins Coie LLP represent Twitter.

The case is In re DMCA 512(h) Subpoena to Twitter Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 4:20-mc-80214, 6/21/22.