Prenda Law “copyright trolls” Steele and Hansmeier arrested
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Ouch.
Which I totally agree with. When this situation started unrolling it really offended my sense of justice. Here were criminals using the judicial system as the tool for their crimes. It really showed how the US judicial systems costs and processes have created a mechanism for abuse. I wish sometimes there were some criminal law around abuse of a public institution which would capture this sort of thing more quickly and effectively.
Yes: reduce the term of copyright and expand fair use.
However, while Prenda used copyright infringement as a cudgel in these cases, there was no infringement in any of the suits that they brought.
I believe this way more likely than a complete change of U.S. copyright law.
From my following of the ADA abuse, which is fairly rampant and basically equivalent to these two, the only real solution is getting a lawyer designated as a vexatious litigant[0] which is a very high standard to reach. I'm not sure if every state even has such a designation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St...
Hilariously:
> "We consider ourselves to be an advocacy association more than we consider ourselves a law firm," [Paul Hansmeier] said. "With the porn reputation, I wanted to shift my focus and focus on something more positive. We're really focused on doing it right so anyone who hears about us says, 'Yeah. This is the right way to go about it.'"
There was a woman in the SF bay area who was finally restricted from filing lawsuits, but look what she had to do before the courts took action:
>McColm, a law school graduate, has acted as her own attorney in filing dozens of lawsuits against public agencies, tenants, banks, neighbors, physicians, newspapers, lawyers and insurance firms.
>Litigating with McColm "is a time-consuming and incredibly expensive quagmire," the homeowners' brief said. "Discovery becomes hand-to-hand combat and litigation a war of attrition as McColm filed motion after motion without regard to the merits of any arguments or the veracity of the facts."
>Among McColm's lawsuits was one for injunctive relief from children next door playing basketball in their own back yard.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-woman-vexatious-litig...
>“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
> —Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
...
> they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum ... just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow, starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.
[1] https://popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/PendaSanction...
> Our courts are halls of justice where fairness and the rule of law triumph
> — US Attorney Andrew Luger
https://thepiratebay.org/user/sharkmp4/
Update: Camcast confirms account is owned by Steele.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/copyright-troll-honesypot.pn...
I mean, if these guys wrote me a letter saying "pay up, or we'll let everyone know you like pr0n!" - I would write back "Eh - they already know that."
...so there has to have been more to it?
I mean - provided one was honest to those in their lives about their pr0n...
But the part that I really find interesting is this:
>>Character is destiny. ....they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall
I say bullshit. Just look at Trump. The guy has fucked over so many people and sexually assaulted many woman by his own words and we still elected him.
It let to their downfall because they were not powerful enough.
[1]https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal...
Suffice it to say, enough Americans reject that narrative about Trump for him to have won the election. There are much better examples out there.
A lot has to do with luck, with how easily cowed your enemies are, etc.
You've inspired me to write a Greasemonkey script to filter out any comment with the word "Trump" in it. Thanks.
So you'll be missing out on some things.
(They're good books. Read them.)
At that point we might as well just assume they abolish the two-term limit and crown him king.
I don't see Trump making it to a second term, especially with all the missteps he's taken so far, and he's not even President yet.
Mind, I think that prior is moved by the fact that he's a historically unpopular president-elect already, but we will indeed see over four years what he manages to make of himself. Or whether he manages to collapse capitalism once and for all.
Whatever.
Stretching back further in the 20th century, Hoover lost due to the depression and LBJ declined to run for a second term because the Vietnam War was so unpopular they knew he wouldn't have a chance.
None of those are conventional political circumstances. So while you're right that it's about 3/4 incumbent races won, it seems that if there isn't a massive ongoing crisis, scandal, or political anomaly, the incumbent's chances are very good.
For a job like president, the circumstances are almost always ongoing a crisis or political anomaly. I imagine re-elected incumbents also had to face exceptional political circumstances, just were able to navigate through them with luck and skill.
That's been debunked: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/
...and really, in general this is just so much post-facto justification. Whatever the election result, Reasons will always be found in hindsight. If Clinton had lost in '96, you'd be able to say it was due to the Whitewater affair. If GWB had lost in '04, you'd be able to blame the unpopular wars in the middle east (or more specifically, Abu Graib). If Obama had lost in '12, it would be easy to pin it on Obamacare.
Neither is Trump.
If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here.
No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it.
Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work.
I guess if you combine all of those together then you doing something wrong. But isn't it ironic that the GOV is allowed to run illegal sting operations even if they lose big time like in Fast and Furious and that's fine, but if few lawyers figure out the way to make extra money, then we need to indict them.
If anything -- were they actually a fish who happen to clean the ocean? I mean it comes to be as simple as this: do not download illegal porn. Period. I can bet after being charged by those lawyers many settled and never downloaded porn again.
There - finished playing devils advocate.
Then there's the issue of misrepresenting/lying to the court. The court doesn't like this kind of game (trying to entrap people into a situation where you can sue them), so they repeatedly lied to the court in order to make it look like "not this kind of game". The court really doesn't like being lied to.
You're not a horrible advocate. But the devil is still the devil.
What if I have genuine porn website (I don't) with self made movies and people go and purchase them online. If later on I find my sales went to $0 and everything can be find on torrents, then I might be afraid of suing copyrights thefts because maybe after Prenda case judge will see it as a blackmail!
But they went further, by allowing people to download the video they then exploited the legal system by not charging the people who walked through that front door looking for things to take with robbery, but merely blackmailed those people into paying them money to remain silent, or else they would "publicly" press charges. That is what they are being accused and apparently charged for.
Sure, don't download illegally shared porn, music, movies or tv shows. But if you do download that content illegally, you also have a right not not be blackmailed for the action. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Basically everyone that settled a case in or out of the court was blackmailed? Doubt that.
I think if someone is breaking the law and you tell them stop or I sue you, then its even offensive to call it a blackmail.
Again, I don't look at this case from right-or-wrong point of view, as it seems it is a scam what they did. I'm rather interested whether the lady of justice will be blindfolded and find no crime was committed, or judge will hate them because its related to pornography and blackmailing.
They didn't tell them "stop or I'll sue you" - they said "Give me $3,000 or I'll sue you, and by the way, it'll likely cost you more than $3,000 to defend yourself."
The grandparent post used "blackmail" informally; they aren't charged with that, so it's definition in a court of law is tangential. They are charged with perjury, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to commit both perjury and subornation of perjury, and also charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
None of which would be an issue with fact-based copyright claims against people the person suing (and offering to settle) believed reasonably were (or even might be) guilty.
I think a basket of candy set out in front of your door halloween is a better analogy - you can't credibly call the police department with a report that children are trespassing on your property and stealing your candy.
You can't STEAL something the rightful owner of a piece of property willfully and knowingly gives you for free.
I agree, analogies don't really work. The fact remains that the downloaders of the movies were receiving the content from a place (the pirate bay) that rarely distributed legal content (and then, it was just mirroring distribution of things like Gnu/Linux ISOs). There is still an argument that remains that the alleged infringers had intent to violate copyright law.
The other argument here is that the creators or producers of the content hired or otherwise partnered with a firm that, in order to drum up business(?) allegedly distributed that content through the pirate bay, and simply filed John Doe subpoenas against every IP that connected to them. The article links to the other ArsTechnica article that points to someone who wrote what is essentially a BitTorrent "shell" program that acts and masquerades as a genuine client, connecting to a swarm and announcing availability of a torrent without actually receiving or sending content data. This is how other firms traditionally find and discover alleged torrent leachers and seeders from what I've read. As a devil's advocate to this practice, it may be that Prenda simply didn't hire an IT consultant that knew what they were doing and in order to discover potential infringers of the content they leached the movie themselves. Over time became the primary source of the content via TPB as they had more incentive to keep seeding to catch more unsuspecting leechers while consumers of the content got bored with the same sex scenes and moved to different porn, dropping out of the swarm.
What I'm saying is that it may have started with just incompetence of their part, and once they were called out on their practices, they might have thought that they weren't doing anything wrong. However, as more information became available it became more clear that they were basically baiting and extorting, and they had to continue to lie about what they were doing or else their ruse would be up (and they could go to jail). I'm glad to see some initial closure on this story with them getting charged, but I'm doubtful that Prenda went into this in the very beginning with the idea of seeding content "illegally" in order to find infringers of whom they could send bills to remain quiet and not proceed directly into litigation.
But I don't think you can make a good case that uploading content you own to a public BitTorrent tracker does not create an implied license to download them content from the tracker.
1. They lied to the courts to cover up the fact that they were, in fact, advocating for their own shell companies. Doing this is not a crime, lying about it is.
2. When the courts started limiting them to 1 defendant per lawsuit, they lied again and invented fake allegations of hacking. They had not been hacked, they just needed false pretenses to send more ISP subpoenas.
3. When judges started catching on to the above and asked them to explain themselves, they lied still more to cover up their previous lies.
4. One of them forged the signature of his housekeeper, setting the housekeeper up as the owner of a shell company.
5. They uploaded files to ThePirateBay themselves, then lied and said they didn't.
If nothing else, to note that included on that list is perjury in the course of a bar association complaint against their own attorney. So, maybe, it's not a good idea to be the advocate for these devils...
The kind of activity Prenda engaged in probably still happens quite often, and people are forced to settle and everyone moves on. What Prenda did(quite exceptionally) was their aggressiveness in pursuing their "victims", the complex shell company structure they set up, then subsequently lied about, their contempt for court proceedings, their perjuries in many cases, etc, etc...basically, they pushed the system to its brink with no consideration, and after 3-ish years, the system bounced back with all the built-up inertia and squished them.
To address your specific points:
- If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here. - yep
- No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it. - yep
- Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work. - yep. Except the only question is, are they "illegally" downloading your work if you put it up yourself for free download? This was one of the earliest things that courts grappled with vs Prenda, before the whole thing turned to crazyland.
It's useful to check out the early posts on the subject, for example https://popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing-in-... Notice how even "early" in this case, things were already shifting away from your devil's advocate position and into allegations of fraud against Prenda and fights with the judges themselves(if you want to take a dive into the crazy, https://popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-law... is a good start..)
Here's also a comment from one of the people that were following Prenda closely before Ken got involved, "Die Trolls Die":
> Going after porn pirates requires a real investigation which requires much time, effort, and money. One recent case in IN had a Prenda local attorney only doing 5 hours of work – only one hour for the investigation. These outfits were not designed to do this. IMO it is a business model more than any effort to protect the content owners. As none of these porn copyright infringement cases have gone to full trial – judged on the merits (since 2010), it speaks volumes. Dismissals and default judgements only. Saying that, copyright infringement does happen and the content owners do have a right to take action. I just happen to disagree on how they are doing it.
The issue is that they didn't just upload their porn "to the cloud". They seeded their porn via bittorrent, which is a tool used specifically to share files to others. Seeding your own work via bit torrent is at the very least giving implied consent to others to download said work. If you give consent to others to download your work, you can hardly sue them later and claim the downloading was unauthorized.
The consequences are that the defense will see through it very fast and won't settle so quickly, making the whole business model fail by a war of attrition.