Mr. Haselton's points miss the mark because of his misconceptions about the legal system. For example, Mr. Haselton repeatedly states that anybody is a potential defendant. He further states that "For a court to take a plaintiff's case against a given defendant seriously, they just have to believe that there is a reasonable probability of the plaintiff winning." Both of these statements are legally incorrect.
Both of the above statements highlight Mr. Haselton's ignorance of legal procedure. There isn't anything wrong with this ignorance, but even the best logician can't fathom whether statements are sound and logical unless he knows the language being spoken (or written). Here, Mr. Haselton doesn't understand the language of legal procedure and, therefore, fails in his analysis of the Judge's opinion.
Taking the above two statements in turn: 1) No, it's not really accurate to state anyone is a potential defendant. There are many reasons for this. First, courts have limits on their jurisdiction and the hypothetical "anybody in the world" just can't be haled in front of any U.S. or state court. That court must be able to obtain jurisdiction over their person -- this is called personal jurisdiction.
But wait, you might say, technically I could file a lawsuit and name anyone and get it into the court system! Yes, that may be technically true, but I can raise you another technicality to counterbalance this point. If I sue someone from, say, China then I still need to serve them. This means I have to actually issue a notice of lawsuit to them in a manner accepted by the court. Presuming I overcome this hurdle, yet this person does nothing in the court where I sued them, then I may get what's called a default judgment. The problem then comes to enforcing it; I probably can't get it enforced in China, and even its enforcement locally (say, for instance, if my Chinese friend visited where I live) will be suspect. Questions of that original service and of personal jurisdiction, along with subject matter jurisdiction, will arise.
This leads to 2) the idea that all courts need to sustain an action is to believe there is a reasonable chance of the plaintiff winning. Mr. Haselton is wrong on this point. Courts need to have not only personal jurisdiction over the parties (including the defendant), but subject matter jurisdiction over the type of case being brought. One example of subject matter jurisdiction might be me suing someone for being a jerk. Well, there isn't a cause of action for being a jerk. I can file the lawsuit and pay my court filing fees all I want, and I can even serve the defendant properly, but the court can (and likely will) dismiss the case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
Really all this comes down to is Mr. Haselton's presumptions of what is relevant, and what is not relevant, are off base and therefore render his conclusions fallacious.
But let's get to the meat of why the Judge's opinion is not a weak argument, and therefore why Mr. Haselton is wrong.
The Judge's opinion takes issue with the tactics used by the Plaintiff. One of the big reasons why there is an issue is the Plaintiff's use of ex parte motions. Mr. Haselton admit that he's "not even sure what Judge Baker is saying here," so let me clear this up.
Ex Parte communications are one-sided communications in a lawsuit between a judge and only one party. This is repugnant to the adversarial legal system in the U.S. and may only occur in very limited, and often emergency, situations. The reason is that all parties legally have a right to know what communications have occurred between the parties, thereby granting the non-communicating party an opportunity to issue objections or have their own say.
This tactic is at the heart of why the Judge refers to Plaintiff's actions as a fishing expedition that he won't support. Essentially a lawsuit has been filed, but the suit has not been served on any of the defendants. Therefore the court has not obtained personal jurisdiction over the defendants, if that's even possible, and any potential defendants have no ability to contest the ex parte motions by Plaintiffs.
This also raises significant questions of whether the Judge can obtain jurisdiction over this matter. Since all Defendants are, at this point, fictional, and none have been properly served with the complaint, there is in effect only personal jurisdiction over the Plaintiff. Therefore, Plaintiff's efforts to have subpoenas issued to ISPs in these cases amounts to asking the court to require these ISPs, under penalty of legal sanction, to cough up user data that may or may not uncover someone who can be tried as a defendant in the Judge's court.
In short, the Judge is balking at being a tool for the Plaintiff to force the ISPs to act as their own investigatory arm. The Plaintiffs have failed to make a good faith showing, in the Judge's mind, that the IP addresses it has will result in uncovering the names of the John Doe defendants it is trying to sue. (Fishing expedition.) Further, the Plaintiffs are filing motions that try to force ISPs to uncover private data of their customers while not affording their alleged targets a method for contesting these motions. (Ex parte motions, a big no-no.)
Finally, the reason the Judge is correct that the whole rental car analogy fails is that rental car agencies CAN be held liable for the actions of their customers, where as ISPs cannot be held liable for the actions of their consumers because of laws like the DMCA. Therefore, the very point behind the Judge's rejection of the analogy is that a car rental accident case will result in a Defendant the court can obtain jurisdiction over (potentially) and a way for the eventual Defendant (the customer) to be put on clear notice of the lawsuit, and provided an opportunity to respond to motions by the Plaintiff.
So while it doesn't matter whether you're a mathematician, programmer, lawyer, or other citizen when it comes to understanding the law and legal opinions, it does matter whether you understand the legal frameworks being discussed. Mr. Haselton does not, although I do not doubt that he would be able to parse through the opinion and provide a clearer analysis if he took a Civil Procedure class (or just read Examples & Explanations: Civil Procedure).
John William Nelson
P.S. Please forgive the gloss over above; it was a quick write and therefore more wordy and less clear than it could be.
