I submitted the story and I agree my comment to use Google cache was misleading. To the flamers, yes I know it won't really protect you and that Google isn't the most privacy-loving company in the world.

What I meant to imply was that the defendants could have been using Google cache. The defendant posted links to three articles and copied some text from each. You don't need to load the original page for that. Just the Google cache will do, and often it's faster.

Plaintiffs didn't send a letter to Google, at least not one that's in the court filing. AFAIK Google uses a very distributed and dynamic system to store its cache, so good luck finding which system cached that page at a particular time almost one year ago. But maybe they can try.

Not subpoenaing Google creates some problems, because it could be that the subpoenas have no chance of finding the actual poster but have a good chance of finding innocent readers. The plantiffs' names had been posted numerous times before, and plenty of people could have searched for and found and read those pages without any malicious intent. And of course the plaintiffs are actual people, law students in fact, so they may have had friends, classmates, etc. that innocently searched for their names as well.

But I should put "innocently" in quotes, because who knows if that is about to change.