Judge James Donato, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge James Donato, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Reddit will not have to turn over the identity of a user to the organizational body of the Jehovah's Witness faith after a judge ruled Monday in a copyright dispute with major potential implications for online free speech.

In a 16-page order, U.S. District Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California found that a Reddit contributor's posts critiquing the church and its administrative body, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania were a noninfringing fair use of the group's copyrighted works.

Rejecting a magistrate judge's prior recommendation, Donato granted a motion to quash a subpoena from Watch Tower seeking identifying information of a Redditor known as Darkspilver. The subpoena, issued to Reddit last January, sought Darkspilver's subscriber information, name, telephone number, address, email and IP addresses, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Reddit declined to respond to the subpoena, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened on behalf of the anonymous user.

"The only authorized purpose for the subpoena under the DMCA was to discover his identity as an alleged copyright infringer to protect Watch Tower's copyrights," Donato said. "If Darkspilver establishes that he made fair use of the copyrighted works, no claim of copyright infringement could plausibly be alleged against him, and the subpoena would not be authorized under the DMCA."

Last May, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the Northern District of California ruled that Reddit must reveal the identity of the user, but only to attorneys involved in the case. Donato said Kim's approach of applying the First Amendment to anonymous online speech was problematic. "It is a developing area where the standards are far from settled," he wrote.

Donato also said that Kim's invocation of the two-part test for anonymous speech the Northern District of California developed in 2005 in Highfields Capital Management v. Doe did not involve the key elements of copyright or the DMCA. "Highfields, the source of the test, involved claims sounding in trademark and unfair competition, but not copyright law or fair use," he said.

When it came to the fair use arguments, the judge said that Watch Tower failed to challenge any of the evidence.

"Instead, it offers the general challenge that the inquiry is 'woefully premature' because fair use is an affirmative defense that can't be considered unless and until a complaint is on file," according to the opinion. "This is a surprising proposition given that Watch Tower was required to evaluate fair use before sending its take-down notice to Reddit, and that Watch Tower and its attorney represented they had done that. They are not well situated to say now that the inquiry should wait."

Reddit and Alex Moss of the Electronic Frontier Foundation did not respond to a request for comment Monday evening.

Watch Tower's counsel, Paul D. Polidoro, an in-house lawyer for Watch Tower in Warwick, New York, and Anthony Smith of the Law Office of Anthony V. Smith in San Mateo, California, also did not respond to a message requesting comment late Monday.

Read more: 

Reddit User Continues Fight for Anonymity Against Jehovah's Witnesses Organization

Judge Questions Why Takedown Not Enough in Watch Tower's Quest to ID Reddit User