[smackfu]

It's really just the continued abuse of the courts by Prenda. They have no real interest in taking this libel suit anywhere. All they want are the IP addresses, so they can cross-reference it against their list of infringer IPs and names/addresses from other cases and then file individual copyright suits against those people as punishment.

It makes this a very high stakes game, since even if the court throws out the result of the subpoena for use in the libel case, Prenda gets what they want. You could argue that is why they filed three separate actions in three different courts, just to up the odds that one of them would get the desired information.

They've done very similar things before, where they filed a lawsuit against the same list of IP addresses / John Does in a dozen different venues, because they only needed one judge to allow the discovery request to go through to get what they wanted.