• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 13, 2010

A federal judge has okayed independent filmmakers' attempts to unmask thousands of Web users who allegedly downloaded movies from peer-to-peer networks.

In a ruling issued late last week, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer in Washington ruled that the Web users can't quash subpoenas to their ISPs because subscribers don't have a "cognizable claim of privacy in their subscriber information."

Collyer reasoned that Web users have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their data because "they already have conveyed such information to their Internet Service Providers."

Many judges have allowed companies or other plaintiffs in lawsuits to subpoena ISPs and other Web companies for users' names when there is good reason to do so, but Collyer's rationale in this case -- that subscribers have no expectation of privacy because they gave their names to an ISP when registering for an account -- isn't universally accepted.

Consider, two years ago the New Jersey Supreme Court said the exact opposite. "We now hold that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy ... in the subscriber information they provide to internet service providers -- just as New Jersey citizens have a privacy interest in their bank records stored by banks and telephone billing records kept by companies," the court wrote in a unanimous decision.

That reasoning doesn't mean that subscriber information can never be disclosed -- only that those who are attempting to discover such information must show they are entitled to obtain it. In fact, in the New Jersey case the court said that police must obtain subpoenas from grand juries, and not municipal courts, when attempting to learn the identities of ISP users.

But the New Jersey court's decision, in contrast to Collyer's, recognizes that people who go online aren't voluntarily and knowingly giving up all privacy simply by signing up for Web service.