Judge refuses to block Watch Tower's bid to identify anonymous JW archivist

A federal judge has refused to cancel a subpoena that Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania obtained to learn the identity of an anonymous Jehovah's Witness who built a searchable archive of the organisation's own publications. In an Opinion and Order signed on 21 July 2026 at White Plains, New York, United States District Judge Kenneth M. Karas wrote that the archivist — named in the court file only as "J. Doe" — "has not shown that any First Amendment-protected interest in anonymity requires the Court to quash the subpoena."^[1]

Doe has not been identified. The same order that turned down Doe's request also keeps the subpoena frozen. "Cloudflare's compliance with the subpoena . . . shall remain held in abeyance until the Court addresses whether a protective order should be entered," Judge Karas wrote — held in abeyance meaning put on hold, and a protective order being a court order that limits who is allowed to see a particular piece of information.^[1]

The ruling is narrow in one sense and broad in another. It decides only that Doe cannot use the First Amendment to block the subpoena at this early stage; it does not decide that Doe broke copyright law. But to get there the Court had to look at whether Doe's copying was legal, and in doing so it drew a line that matters to anyone who republishes a religious organisation's back catalogue: the software tools Doe built to analyse Watch Tower's texts are "plainly transformative," the Court said — the finding that weighs most heavily toward fair use — while on the record in front of it the Court could not find the archive of complete publications to be a fair use at all.

What a DMCA subpoena is, and how this one was issued

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act lets a copyright owner obtain a subpoena — a legally binding demand for records — aimed at an internet company, asking it to identify a customer the owner accuses of infringement. It is a pre-litigation subpoena: it comes before any lawsuit exists.

Watch Tower filed its request on 4 December 2025, and Judge Karas signed an order four days later directing the clerk of court to issue the subpoena to Cloudflare, Inc.^[2] Cloudflare is the company Doe used as a reverse proxy — a service that sits between visitors and the machines actually hosting a website, which both hides who owns the site and shields it from attacks designed to knock it offline. According to Doe's declaration, both of those were the point.^[1]

Cloudflare had not complied by the time Watch Tower went back to court. On 21 January 2026 Watch Tower asked the Court to hold the company in contempt; Doe's lawyers appeared the same day, and Cloudflare's counsel appeared on 2 February and opposed. At a conference on 23 February 2026 the Court denied the contempt motion, gave Doe permission to challenge the subpoena, and put the subpoena on hold in the meantime.^[2]

Doe filed a motion to quash — a request that the court cancel the subpoena — on 9 March 2026; Watch Tower opposed it on 23 March and Doe replied on 30 March. Doe is represented by Mitchell L. Stoltz and Elizabeth D. Femia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco digital-rights group, with Jonathan L.A. Phillips of Brown, Hay & Stephens in Peoria, Illinois.^[1] EFF says it acts for Doe here and in a companion case involving Google.^[3]

What Doe told the court they had built

Almost everything the Court knows about why Doe built the site comes from a sworn statement Doe filed, recited in the opinion as Doe's account rather than as established fact. According to that declaration, Doe is a foreign citizen who was "raised as a Jehovah's Witness" and has "been a member of that community [their] whole life." Most of Doe's friends, family members and coworkers are Jehovah's Witnesses, and Doe "still consid[ers] [themself] a Jehovah's Witness." Doe told the court they have "questions, doubts[,] and concerns" about "aspects of the community's teachings and practices," and are uneasy about the consequences of raising them — including being "labe[l]ed [an] 'apostate[]' and be[ing] excommunicated or 'disfellowshipped' from the community," the term Jehovah's Witnesses use for formal expulsion from a congregation.^[1] (The Court used gender-neutral pronouns for Doe, noting that "the Parties do not identify Doe's gender." JW Files does the same.)

Doe's stated reason for building the site, again from the declaration, is that "the Jehovah's Witnesses organization . . . has altered the historical record of its own publications" while not providing "access to many of their own historical publications," leaving what Doe calls an "incomplete and unreliable official record." The examples Doe gave the Court were the organisation's past predictions about when the world would end, and increases in "requests for donations and calls for obedience."^[1] These are Doe's allegations; the Court did not rule on whether they are true.

What Doe built came in two parts. One was an archive of Watch Tower publications, made text-searchable using optical character recognition, the technology that turns a scanned page image into machine-readable words. The other was text- and data-mining software designed "to analyze the frequency of use of particular words, phrases, and citations to Bible verses over time." Doe published both anonymously on a website and shared links on a Reddit forum, and says they never made and never sought to make money from either.^[1]

Doe has since taken the archive down. The analytical tools, the Court noted, "have continued functioning after the archive was taken down."^[1]

What Watch Tower told the court

Watch Tower is the party that asked for the subpoena, and it prevailed on this motion. Its position reaches the opinion through a declaration from its counsel and its brief. Watch Tower describes itself as "a nonprofit corporation organized to create, publish, and distribute intellectual property that supports the global bible education work of Jehovah's Witnesses." It owns the copyright in some of the material Doe archived, including the July/August 2022 edition of Awake!, and it attached the copyright registration as an exhibit. Doe did not dispute either that Watch Tower owns the copyright or that Doe copied the magazine.^[1]

The organisation also told the Court that it does not "make ecclesiastical decisions" and does not "remove individuals from their local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses." And it said it runs its own archive, which "includes an index of changes in the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses" from 1870 to the present.^[1]

On the money question, Watch Tower argued that "[w]ithout Doe's identity and an opportunity for discovery . . . it is impossible to truly discern the full extent and nature of Doe's use of Watch Tower's works." The Court was not persuaded on the record in front of it: Watch Tower's own screenshots showed no advertisements and no paywall, so the Court found Doe's use noncommercial.^[1]

The five-part test the Court applied

To decide whether to cancel a subpoena aimed at unmasking someone, courts in this circuit use a five-factor checklist from a 2010 appeals-court decision, Arista Records, LLC v. Doe 3. Judge Karas listed them: how solid the copyright owner's opening showing of harm is — in law a "prima facie" case, meaning enough evidence to proceed unless it is answered; how specific the request is; whether there is any other way to get the information; whether the information is needed to bring the claim; and how much privacy the person objecting could reasonably expect.^[1]

The first four went to Watch Tower.

• The opening showing. Copyright infringement requires ownership of a valid copyright plus copying. Both were established and neither was contested, which is enough at this stage. Fair use, the Court held, is a defence that answers such a case rather than part of it.^[1]
• Specificity. The subpoena asks for subscriber registration information, names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and IP addresses — enough to deliver legal papers to a defendant, which is the test.^[1]
• No alternative. Watch Tower filed an unchallenged statement from an information-technology and network-security professional who said he could not identify Doe "through independent investigation, monitoring, or other public sources."^[1]
• Need. Without a name, there is no one to sue.^[1]

The Court also rejected two of Watch Tower's own arguments along the way: that Doe gave up any claim to anonymity by agreeing to Cloudflare's terms of service, and that the Arista checklist is the wrong framework for a pre-lawsuit DMCA subpoena.^[1]

Why the case came down to fair use

The fifth factor — Doe's expectation of privacy — is where the case was decided, and it folded into a copyright question. The reasoning runs in a chain. The right to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment only where the speech itself is protected. Copying someone else's copyrighted work is protected speech only if it is fair use — the rule in copyright law that allows unlicensed use of a work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. So whether Doe could stay anonymous turned on whether Doe's copying was fair use.^[1]

Fair use is weighed on four statutory factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work copied, how much of it was used, and the effect on the market for the original.

The tools and the archive were treated differently

Judge Karas split Doe's two creations apart. The analytical tools, he held, are "plainly transformative." A use is transformative when it does something genuinely different with the original — a new purpose, meaning or message — rather than simply re-serving it. The Court compared the tools to Google Books and to the HathiTrust research database, both of which appellate courts have upheld: a word-frequency search returns something different in purpose and character from the page it was drawn from. Watch Tower, the Court observed, "rightly does not focus its briefing on the analytics features."^[1]

The archive was a different matter. The source material, the Court found, sat on Doe's website "in its entirety for all to read," which made it closer to the Internet Archive's free digital lending library — held by the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court covering New York, in 2024 not to be fair use. Converting print to digital, that court said, is "[c]hanging the medium," a derivative use — a reissue of the same work in another form — rather than a transformative one.^[1]

Judge Karas accepted that Doe "has thoroughly explained" a critical purpose behind the archive. But he held that the purpose was not visible from the archive itself. On the exhibits before him, the pages carried only the banner "JWS Online Library, Historical Archive to preserve expressions of faith" and "did not seem to include or link to any criticism or discussion of the archive's purpose." On Doe's own indication, the archive could also be reached through conventional search engines, meaning "some viewers of the archive might not be aware that the materials were being presented with a transformative message or purpose at all." The Court accepted that where Doe posted links — "in a social media community and context" — Doe's message "was clear." The tools, he noted, kept working after the archive came down.^[1]

The remaining factors split. The nature of the work "slightly favors Doe," because the Awake! issue is published and mixes factual and expressive material. The amount used favoured Watch Tower: the copying was complete, and Doe "could have disclosed only parts of the works they directly compared or critiqued, or disclosed the full works only privately." Market effect tipped somewhat in Doe's favour — Watch Tower "has not shown a present, actual, or imminent impact to any licensing revenue," though it did attest that it licenses copies of the archived materials for research use.^[1]

The Court's summary — "Petitioner" is its label for Watch Tower:

The Court called its own finding provisional

The opinion repeatedly marks the fair-use conclusion as preliminary — "at this stage," "on this record," "at this early stage." Judge Karas quoted a 2026 Second Circuit decision cautioning that "courts most frequently address a proffered fair use defense at summary judgment," a later phase where both sides have had the chance to gather evidence.^[1] Four of the five Arista factors favoured Watch Tower, he concluded, and the fifth was "a close call on this early record."^[1]

The Court set the shunning question aside. In a footnote, the Court noted that Watch Tower "does not rebut Doe's claims that the consequences of shunning or 'disfellowshipping' can be serious," but that Doe pointed to no legal authority for weighing those consequences in deciding whether to cancel a subpoena. It quoted a 2020 California ruling in another Watch Tower case: "Watch Tower is perfectly free to organize its internal disciplinary practices as it sees fit, without interference from the courts. . . . those considerations play no role whatsoever in the fair use analysis."^[1]

Two earlier attempts that failed

In January 2022, in the same courthouse, Judge Nelson S. Román quashed a Watch Tower DMCA subpoena aimed at a YouTube creator. That user, described in the opinion as "a lapsed Jehovah's Witness who publishes satirical videos critical of the religious denomination," made "stop-frame Lego animations" — set, the opinion records, in a fictitious village called "Dubtown" — that satirised and criticised the organisation's practices. Judge Román held that "three of the four statutory fair use factors favor Movant, including the most important factor," that the creator "did not infringe Watch Tower's copyrighted works," and that "there is no basis under the DMCA for a subpoena to compel disclosure of his identity."^[4] Judge Karas cites that decision in the current opinion.^[1]

In 2020, a federal court in California quashed a Watch Tower subpoena seeking to identify a Reddit user, holding that the user had made fair use of a Watch Tower advertisement and chart. EFF, which represented that user, announced the outcome on 3 March 2020.^[5] The 2026 opinion cites that decision as well.^[1]

Across those three proceedings, the 21 July 2026 order is the first in which Watch Tower has prevailed at this stage. That is a comparison of the two opinions JW Files obtained and a third 2020 decision reported by EFF and cited in the 21 July order — not a count of every subpoena Watch Tower has ever sought.

A parallel case over Google is on a different judge's docket

Watch Tower filed a second petition against Google on 4 December 2025, the same day as the Cloudflare one.^[6] According to EFF, it seeks the identity of the same person.^[3] That case, In re: DMCA Subpoena to Google Inc., No. 7:25-mc-00554, went to Judge Nelson S. Román — the judge who quashed Watch Tower's subpoena in 2022. He signed the order directing the clerk to issue the Google subpoena on 8 December 2025.^[6]

Under a schedule Judge Román set in January, both sides served their papers privately and then filed everything together on 23 April 2026.^[6] The public CourtListener mirror of that docket was last refreshed on 4 July 2026 and records no decision as of that refresh. JW Files could not check the live court docket, which sits behind PACER's paid login, so nothing here establishes what has or has not happened in that case since 4 July.

EFF published a post about the two subpoenas on 10 March 2026 under the headline "Copyright Bullying vs. Religious Freedom" — the group's own characterisation, not a court finding.^[7] Eric Goldman, a law professor who writes on internet law, covered the ruling the day it was signed and gave its commercial-database reference as 2026 WL 2110881.^[8]

What happens next

Judge Karas directed counsel for Doe and Watch Tower to confer within 14 days to try to agree on the wording of a protective order shielding Doe's identity from public disclosure. If they cannot agree, Doe has 7 days after that conference to file a letter setting out their position and addressing the factors an appeals court laid down in Sealed Plaintiff v. Sealed Defendant — the checklist for when a litigant may proceed under a pseudonym. Watch Tower then has 7 days to respond.^[1]

The Court explained why it raised the idea. Anonymity in this proceeding does Doe little good, because a pre-lawsuit subpoena is "separate from any case for copyright infringement that Petitioner may later bring." A protective order, by contrast, can outlive the case it is issued in.^[1]

As of the Cloudflare docket JW Files reviewed on 25 July 2026, last refreshed by CourtListener on 22 July, nothing has been filed after the opinion; the live PACER docket was not checked.^[2]

The opinion is explicit on what happens to Doe's identity if Cloudflare does comply: "The foregoing does not mean Doe's identity must be publicly revealed as soon as Cloudflare complies with the subpoena."^[1]