Plaintiff, a TikTok creator with roughly one million followers, makes his living livestreaming on the platform. After an anonymous Reddit user posted a 27-second clip of one of his livestreams alongside a paragraph of pointed criticism, plaintiff claimed the clip infringed his copyright. He wanted the user identified.

To get that identity, plaintiff served a subpoena on defendant Reddit under the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. § 512(h), which lets copyright holders compel service providers to name alleged infringers. Defendant refused, asserting its user’s First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Plaintiff then moved to compel.

The court denied the motion and quashed the subpoena. It held that plaintiff could not make even a threshold showing of infringement, because the user’s post was fair use.

Working through the four statutory fair use factors, the court found each one favored the user, emphasizing that the clip was copied for criticism and commentary and that lost goodwill from such criticism is not a cognizable copyright harm. Because fair use means there is no infringement at all, plaintiff had no valid claim to support a § 512(h) subpoena, and the court never reached the First Amendment balancing.

The decision is a useful reminder that copyright cannot be repurposed as a tool to unmask a critic, a point sharpened by plaintiff’s own framing of the post as false and defamatory rather than infringing.

In re DMCA Subpoena to Reddit, Inc., 2026 WL 1847873 (N.D. Cal., June 26, 2026)