Sixteen record companies who own or license copyrights in popular sound recordings in the United States filed a copyright infringement suit against twenty-five unidentified “John Doe” defendants for dissemination of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works unlawfully over the “Fast Track Network,” a peer-to-peer file sharing system. On April 1, 2004, the District Court of the Middle District of Florida ruled that the issues of personal jurisdiction and venue could be addressed after the defendants are identified, but that, contrary to plaintiff’s contentions, the court does not have to wait to address the joinder question (which requires determining whether severance will prejudice any party or result in undue delay of the litigation). Instead, the Court ruled that all claims except those by the first plaintiff against the first defendant be severed, and that they be be dismissed unless separate new actions, with proper plaintiffs and defendants, are initiated within eleven days of the court order.Plaintiffs relied on Civil Rule of Procedure 20 that allows permissive joinder of claims by plaintiffs or against defendants if the claims “aris[e] our of the same transaction, occurrences, or series of transactions or occurrences and if any question of law or fact common to all these person will arise in the action.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 20(a). The determination of whether claims arise out of the same transaction or occurrences for purposes of Rule 20 is determined on a case-by-case basis. Mosley v. General Motors Corp., 497 F.2d 1130, 1333 (8th Cir. 1974). Applying the transactional test for permissive joinder, which requires that the parties must assert rights (or have rights asserted against them) that arise from related activities, the court found that the claims in the case were not reasonably related or properly joined.
The court concluded that the twenty-five defendants’ interactions with the sixteen different plaintiffs failed to conform to the standards established by FRCP 20. Plaintiffs failed to show how or which of the defendants could be reasonably linked. Beyond the fact that the defendants used the Fast Track peer-to-peer network and the fact that the defendants accessed the Internet through a common internet service provider, no other facts connect the defendants. In particular, none of the defendants disseminated the same copyrighted material or the same songs belonging to the same set of plaintiffs.
The cour distinguished the cases Plaintiff’s cited in favor of allowing permissive joinder in this instance. In Alexander v. Fulton County, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the joinder of claims of eighteen white employees of the sheriffs department because the claims stemmed from the same core allegation that the employees were subject to a systemic pattern or practice of race-based discrimination by the same decision-mater in the same department during the same short time frame. 207 F.3d 1303, 1323 (11th Cir. 2000).
The claims in Alexander arise from the same transactions and are actually related.
In support of their decision to sever the claims, the Court cited Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. 11C Music, in which several plaintiff record companies brought suit against various music companies who “sampled” copyrighted music. 202 F.R.D. 229, 231 (M.C. Tenn. 2001). In Bridgeport, the District Court of the Middle District of Tennessee severed the claims against the various defendants, rejecting the argument that infringement counts are properly joined when the various Plaintiffs have suffered the same harm from the copyright infringement in each of the instances. Instead, it ruled that permissive joinder is not allowed in cases where the only similarities between defendants are allegations that they violated the same statute or acted in the same manner. The District Court of the Middle District of Florida noted that failure to sever the claims against defendant may unduly hinder and burden the defendants. The Florida court further added that severance is also necessary to avoid great inconvenience to the court, since the joinder would require the Clerk’s office to prepare and mail a copy of the order to every defendant.
The Florida Distirct Court recommended that the claims be severed and that new actions be initiated by the plaintiffs or otherwise be dismissed.