It's possible but it's also possible that they threatened to take legal action and Rico panicked. If they did sue him, there will be court dockets.
If there is a case, I would assume it was one that was docketed and then immediately settled, with the Kiwifarmer in question signing whatever bullshit Path.net put in front of him, and then sending it to the judge for a pro forma "yeah, that's nice, case dismissed" signature.
In fact I bet that is EXACTLY what happened here. Rico agreed to do things in his settlement it was not within his power to do. So when he ran to the Mods for a full purge of his posts, and they told him to fuck off this put Path.net in a quandry. They had a settlement, that I am sure included non-disclosure agreements which is routine practice. The problem is the settlement was with Rico, and not 1776 hosting.
But they decided to roll with it, because they are morons who don't do an ounce of research. They went to the upstream and said "yo, we got a court settlement that says X has to happen, its not happened. No we can't share the details with you, there is an NDA. Now do it". Upstream went to Null and told him "there is some sort of court order saying you have to do this". And here we are.
The problem Path.net has is their settlement with Rico is NOT an order of the court. The only people its binding on are the signatories to the settlement, and Null, as agent for his company, has clearly not been made party to the settlement agreement. Which is a huge issue. When he demanded to see the order they were in deep shit. At that point they had to admit there was no such order. Just a settlement agreement. But they didn't. Instead they doubled down. Refused to deal with Josh and tried to brow beat the upstream into being their bully boy.
This boys and girls, is called
abuse of process. Basically, Path.net, through their attorney (who should be reported to his state bar for discipline), decided to try and broaden the scope of a settlement agreement beyond its intent to unserved parties. Causing direct financial and reputational harm. Luckily for them, Nulls upstream started to smell a rat and stopped playing ball. Had they acted on the fraudulent demands there would have been even more civil causes of actions here.
IANAL, but there is grounds for action here. At a minimum the ball can get rolling in the State where the hard drives or upstream are located. Once a case is filed, Subpoenas can be issued to make these idiots show their cards.