Equidyne Corporation v. Does [1]

On May 16, 2002, Equidyne Corporation, a medical device company, sued twenty-one John Doe defendants (identified by pseudonyms) who posted statements about the company on the Yahoo! [2] and Lycos [3] financial message boards. Equidyne claimed that the defendants were current or former employees, that they signed confidentiality agreements, and that their postings to the websites violated their confidentiality agreements.  Equidyne also argued that the postings violated federal securities laws.

Equidyne obtained permission of the court to subpoena Yahoo and Lycos to obtain information that would identify who used the twenty-one pseudonyms.  Lycos identified five defendants.  Three of these defendants, including Henry Rhodes, moved to dismiss the complaint. Equidyne voluntarily dismissed its complaint against two of the defendants, but not Rhodes. The court ultimately granted Rhodes' motion to dismiss for improper venue.

Yahoo provided notice of the subpoena to its relevant subscribers by email.  One such defendant, going by the moniker Aeschylus_2000, filed a motion to quash the subpoena, invoking the First Amendment right to speak anonymously.  According to CyberSLAPP [4], the district judge applied the standard from Dendrite v. Doe [5] and found that Equidyne had shown a prima facie case under federal securities laws and denied the motion to quash.  The court also denied a motion to reargue.  Aeschylus appealed to the Third Circuit arguing that the district court judge misapplied the Dendrite standard.

The case appears to have settled while on appeal.