Prenda Lawyer Pleads Guilty in Pirate Bay Honeypot Case | Hacker News Reader

Prenda Lawyer Pleads Guilty in Pirate Bay Honeypot Case

torrentfreak.com

71 pointsnewman8r15 comments

The Prenda case has been amazing to watch. For years.... If you're interested, this is some of the most amazing jaw-dropping legal coverage of how stupid these lawyers were... and obviously, they are also criminals. https://www.popehat.com/tag/prenda-law/

-David

What bothers me about the Prenda coverage is that what got them in trouble was that they [the legal team, doing the suing] owned the copyright. As far as I've read (basically just the Popehat posts), there was no legal issue with what they were doing, but they hid from the court the fact that they directly earned the penalties imposed on victims.

Everyone treats this as if it were a victory against the practice of copyright trolling, but I don't see how. You can still do copyright trolling, as long as you're a law firm that doesn't own the copyright on behalf of which you're suing outright. A 100% ownership stake, undisclosed, is fraud on the court. A 60% contingency fee would be... normal?

The problem with copyright trolling isn't that copyright owners (!) might start suing over it without having to engage third-party law firms. The problem is the suing. If I were going to choose one group as the most entitled to file lawsuits over copyrights, I'd choose the owners before third-party law firms. How does Prenda reflect that?

Well, there was also their identity theft for legal paperwork, shell companies owned by unborn children, and other false statements to courts about just about anything.

And none of that represents a legal sanction for copyright trolling. Nobody hates them for their identity theft, shell companies, and lies to the court. Everyone hates them for copyright trolling! And copyright trolling is the only thing they did that the court says is fine! But all the coverage headlines how the court is smacking down "copyright trolls". No it isn't. What is the cause to celebrate?

> Nobody hates them for their identity theft, shell companies, and lies to the court.

Actually that's not true. If you followed the case through Techdirt's coverage you'd see plenty of people, and the courts, outraged by all sorts of their behavior including before they extended their activities to trolling with video they owned.

Yes, that's right: while they were in legal trouble for their earlier frauds they launched this particular effort.

Basically scumbags top to bottom.

Ok, if I stipulate that, I still have my original question.

Suppose I'm against copyright trolling and wish it would go away. Does the Prenda case help with that? How?

It had been a while since I followed the Prenda car. But I thought the issues were they owned the material and uploaded it. It wasn't so much that they owned it, but that they did the uploading. And then they lied to the court.

> What bothers me about the Prenda coverage is that what got them in trouble was that they [the legal team, doing the suing] owned the copyright. As far as I've read (basically just the Popehat posts), there was no legal issue with what they were doing, but they hid from the court the fact that they directly earned the penalties imposed on victims.

Various elements of the trolling strategy were cited in the sanctions order besides the fraud of concealing the fact that they were their own clients. Part of the impact of the fraud was that it reduced the likelihood that courts would examine the other elements.

This is superb. Copyright trolling is a thing that among other technological trolling holds digital advancement back and brings some hope and justice to the system.

I remember reading the earliest posts on the Prenda case, when Steele was full of blister and thrwatenening to sue everyone who criticized him. How times have changed.

> After extracting IP-addresses of account holders who allegedly shared the files Prenda created and uploaded, they asked courts for subpoenas to obtain the personal info of their targets from ISPs. This contact information was then used to coerce victims to pay settlements of thousands of dollars.

One would think that people would know to use VPN services when torrenting pirated stuff.

Important message from Verizon – We have received acknowledgement of your fifth copyright alert!

Yeah, that's the heads up.

You're assuming that people who can torrent also understand what a VPN is and how to properly use it. I'm pretty confident that that's broadly false.

ISPs do warn people about copyright infringement.

And in some countries, VPN usage is quite common. Indeed, I've heard that NordVPN runs TV ads in the US. So arguably they're no longer fringe.

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