A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday refused an emergency request from the owners of the Roblox game Steal a Brainrot to restrain 14 online sellers, because the companies never filed the list saying who those sellers are.

The ruling, issued Oct. 26 in the Southern District of New York, denied the plaintiffs’ motion for an ex parte temporary restraining order, the kind a court grants without hearing from the other side. The complaint pointed to a “Schedule A” naming the defendants. It wasn’t on file. “Without the ‘Schedule A’ referenced in the complaint, the Court cannot confirm who, in fact, the defendants are whom Plaintiffs seek to restrain,” the court wrote, as Eric Goldman reported on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

The plaintiffs, Speedy Simulator Gaming and Spyder Games, filed the copyright suit on Oct. 9, according to the court docket. The denial is not final. The companies can fix the problem by filing the list and asking again.

They did file other papers. One was a declaration from Yingchun Hou saying the companies could not verify a current physical address for any of the 14 defendants. Another, an exhibit to the complaint, held screenshots said to show each defendant on Schedule A selling counterfeit products. The complaint itself is still sealed, but the opinion identifies Shengmao Mu of Whitewood Law as the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

In a footnote, the court cited another ruling that found that naming defendants only by reference to a separate document “does not satisfy Rule 10(a) or achieve its intended purpose.” The rule, which requires a complaint to name its parties, “is not a mere procedural nicety,” the court wrote, but “protects the public’s legitimate interest in knowing which disputes involving which parties are before the federal courts.”

The judge then flagged problems the companies would face even with the list in hand. To show the case belongs in New York, they relied on a consultant, Jay Harvey Paragoso, who said in a declaration that “[a]ll the injuries and damages described above are taking place in the United States, including in New York.” The court wasn’t persuaded. “Plaintiffs have made no allegations, submitted no evidence, and advanced no arguments that the original event which caused their injury was in New York,” it wrote.

The complaint also said the sellers’ online stores took orders from and offered to ship to New York addresses, “[a]ccording to Plaintiff[s’] test purchases.” Mr. Mu’s own declaration pulled back from that. “I do not state that counsel or counsel’s staff completed purchases from every Defendant because the declarations and Complaint on which I rely do not establish that fact,” he said in it. Mr. Paragoso’s declaration never says that any defendant sold anything to a consumer in New York, the court found.

The companies offered three reasons the harm couldn’t wait. Lost reputation, trade and goodwill came with no supporting evidence, the court said. The risk that sellers would move their money required a showing that a money judgment couldn’t repair the damage. And protecting their right to an accounting of the sellers’ profits still meant proving that right would be lost without a freeze on assets before judgment. In another footnote, the court questioned whether copyright damages are an equitable remedy at all.

“A temporary restraining order is an extraordinary remedy that will not be granted lightly,” the court wrote, quoting earlier case law.

Suits like this one bundle many online sellers into one complaint, keep their names in a sealed schedule and ask for orders that freeze marketplace accounts and funds before the sellers know they’ve been sued, a practice critics call the SAD scheme. Mr. Goldman, who uses that name, wrote that after thousands of such cases, ex parte restraining orders have become routine. Other judges have begun picking the filings apart, including one in Texas this month.

The same two companies filed a Schedule A complaint in the Western District of Pennsylvania on Oct. 2, along with motions to seal documents and serve defendants by alternative means, according to that docket.

Mr. Goldman wrote that the gap between the complaint’s test-buy claim and Mr. Mu’s declaration could be grounds for sanctions. “I doubt we’ll see such sanctions, though,” he wrote. “Courts routinely tolerate mistakes like this from SAD Scheme counsel.”