Prenda Saga Update: John Steele Pleads Guilty, Admits Entire Scheme
popehat.com
popehat.com
HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=prenda (much of it Popehat)
Huh. Phrased like that, it sounds like a John Grisham novel.
It seem to have only come this far because they doubled down on some already outlandishly scumbag behaviour. If they'd just stopped this might have all blown over for them.
This is probably more cost effective than pursuing private litigation against Steele or any of the Prenda principales, because the U.S. government does most of the heavy lifting.
A real-life prisoner's dilemma unfolding.
Couldn't have happened to a couple of nicer guys. /s
While I share everyone's hatred of the tactics these people have employed over the years, I also hate that felons in the US are given such a hard time after they have served their sentences. People make mistakes and should be allowed to move on from them. A couple of years in federal prison shouldn't carry with it a lifetime of financial despair.
If John Steele can't get housing, can't get food, and can't get a job, but is also supposed to obey the law on penalty of more jail time or another felony on his record, what's he likely to do?
I.e would happily hire someone who was caught in possession of marijuana or a bit of drugs, but not a pedophile, mobster or serial killer.
No matter how thin you slice the piece of cheese there's always going to be a top half and a bottom half and agonizing over the suffering result of intentional misbehavior, ignores the larger pool of suffering experienced by those who never did anything wrong, other than maybe not be born in the right place, or to the right parents, or the right skin color, or the right gender, etc.
I'm not going to wring my hands at the injustice committed against a felon because some law school grad who never committed a felony can now get a law job, solely because a felon can't.
I find it hilarious social commentary that the average HN commenter commiserates with felons but not with the lower 99% of the working population.
You might just find that the injustices you do recognize are linked to the ones you laugh at.
In the vast pile of injustice that is our culture, where felons fall into the hierarchy is unfortunate in isolation, yet simultaneously is also an infinitesimal fraction of the sum of injustice.
https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
(NIJ is research arm of the DOJ)
You say that your comment will be very unpopular with HN, but it seems to me that it's actually very unpopular with facts and statistics.
Now, one of the hard things to measure, is whether the sentences does deter everybody who doesn't commit crimes. I assume that there are crimes you and I have had the opportunity to commit, but weighed the odds of being caught and decided that the outcomes from committing the crimes were not worth it. It's difficult to measure that, but it's also not very useful, because it is hard to say whether the deterrent came from the punishment, or from the fact that it was lawbreaking in the first place, or that the label of "felon" is risky enough given the known outcomes.
In the place I'd argue we want the most deterrence - violent crime - our harshest punishment seems to have no real deterrent value. (I would be interested to see a review of this using more modern statistical / ML techniques to examine the data, though).
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articl...
When I look at crimes of passion or necessity, these cannot be stopped by harsh penalties. A fit of jealous rage doesn't consider the prison term. Hunger won't stop theft. The only place harsh punishments could stand to be effective are crimes which have no moral component. For such crimes ALL persons make an expected value calculation, like a sociopath makes for crimes than an ordinary person would consider immoral.
That is an enormous claim and there are reams of research on this topic - your assertion is not supported. It doesn't even stand up to the most cursory scrutiny - if it were true, then societies and states with harsh punishment would have lower crime - and this is very, very, very obviously not the case.
https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-in-question/2015...
http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...
https://undark.org/article/deterrence-punishments-dont-reduc...
tl;dr Social norms, accepted membership in 'legal' society and education are the best ways to deter crime, followed by certainty of punishment - not its severity. The reason people commit crimes is, in rough order, usually out of desperation, social norms that lead them to believe the prohibited act should be acceptable or ignorance of the knowledge that the prohibited act is illegal, for greed, and, lastly, then for the sheer thrill of it. Severity of punishment doesn't act as a good deterrent for any of those categories - certainty of punishment acts as a deterrent for the latter two, but for the first two, desperation and ignorance, are fairly well inoculated against rational counsel.
Before you start arguing the philosophy regarding merits of punishment v. deterrence, I am going to put it bluntly: the claim at issue - that severity of punishment is a deterrent for crime - is an evidentiary claim and it cannot be proven from first principle. It must be supported evidence, and as far as I can tell, the numbers are in, and they do not appear to be on your side. Unless you have studies that support your conclusion, the philosophy is totally irrelevant.
"Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime"
http://www.nber.org/digest/oct98/w6484.html
"Longer prison sentences deter re-offending, study shows"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8504923...
Longer sentences deter crime up to a point
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/criminal...
"Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows"
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/07/longer-prison-se...
"the average add-on gun law results in a roughly 5 percent decline in gun robberies within the first three years"
https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/dabrams/workingpapers/D...
Note also that 2 of the 4 links you provided are comparing certainty-of-punishment vs harshness-of-punishment. This is a false dichotomy. There's no reason you can't have both. Having harsh punishment doesn't reduce the certainty of punishment in any way.
Is there a lot of contentious debate on this topic, and a lack of consensus on this topic? Of course. But given the lack of clear answers, I'd much rather err on the side of preventing victimization.
In America, we have historically low crime rates and historically low violent crime rates. Simultaneously, we have an insane crisis of prison overpopulation that leads into multi-generational cycles of poverty.
I too would rather err on the side of preventing victimization.
Right now, from where I sit, over-criminalization is a bigger problem than violent crime.
Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent.
You have obviously not known or worked for many lawyers. (Present company excepted, of course.)
As lawyers, I'm betting they could make the same amount of money in the same timeframe practicing legitimately (or, knowing how these idiots operate, "semi-legitimately"), but without the federal prison time.
The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ? Don't get me wrong I think they deserve to go behind bars, but I would have thought what they did was legal in the US.
A lot of the trouble here is how they went about this scheme, not merely the basic idea of what they did. They repeatedly lied to defendants and courts about their operations. Some of the materials they sued over were things they didn't actually have copyright for, but they used false documents to claim that they did. Those false documents involved forged signatures and even invented a person who didn't exist. They even filed defamation lawsuits against a person whose signatures they forged, for daring to say that they hadn't signed this stuff.
Wikipedia has a huge list of the crazy stuff they've done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
So, it's not just about trying to entrap people by "pirating" their own content. It's about massive fraud and abuse along the way.
There are a lot of reasons, the most critical one being that it involved multiple levels of misrepresentations to the involved courts, which is not part of a normal law enforcement sting operation.
(There's also a difference between a criminal sting operation where the prohibited offense is, e.g., buying the goods being offered vs. a civil copyright "sting operation" where the prohibited offense is "copying some work without the consent of the copyright owner", and the active assistance of the copyright owner is involved in the act of copying.)
http://bestfunny-videos.com/video.php?vid=ObZDipKRH0c&13-558...
My understanding of court procedure is limited, but it is pretty clear that the appellants are making some pretty incredible decisions that surprise the judges, including insisting that the proceedings are a criminal case with the possible outcome that the appellants would face life imprisonment for criminal contempt (17:11 - 17:45). I gather this is high comedy for lawyers.
Fun fact: Tallman, the judge in the middle with the great stories - is one of three judges who sit on the FISA court
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell...
Judge Pregerson to the appellate lawyer, Daniel J. Voelker made me laugh (30:25):
"They abused our court system for illegal purposes, to extort money. [...] This has got to be written about for years and years - you're probably going to be part of the story."
Compared to Voelker, Morgan E. Pietz (beginning 35:30) for the appellee does a superb job of keeping discussions on point when faced with similar anecdotes and trivia questions.
Having (unintentionally) watched the whole video I was curious what the decision was, whether Prenda had their day in (criminal contempt) court, but as it transpires the appeal was dismissed: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/13-...
Curiously, as good a job as Pietz may have done making his case, it doesn't appear that when reaching their conclusion, the panel depended on much (if any) of the case law he cited.
ADA was a great way for people with disabilities to get equal access but now I fear its future due to the constant abuse by scumbags like Prenda and others.
Only this time, there's practically a for the children argument behind it.
The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor is a pretty serious defect.
That is super dumb.
Hopefully that specific problem (video captioning) will go away in the next year or two as automatic speech recognition becomes less expensive and more widely available. Basic captioning for compliance should be a single API call. Quality won't be perfect, but good enough for a deaf viewer to get the gist of it.
Literally the entire point of the ADA is to force businesses to make themselves accessible when they have no inherent profit incentive to do so.
> For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned
That's a misleading way of phrasing it.
As a public university, Berkley was never permitted to post unaccessible content online on the first place - that's a pretty unambiguous part of the ADA and is not anywhere close to new. The DOJ has been enforcing that for two decades.
Berkeley did so anyway, and then was told they would have to caption them in order to keep them online. At that point, they chose to take them down.
There is a difference between an expense that doesn't recover its own cost and the thing shutting down your service because the cost exceeds your total profit.
> That's a misleading way of phrasing it.
It's literally what happened. Even if the consequence was that they never posted the videos to begin with, how is that better? It's the same outcome, the only difference is that we can specifically identify this case because it actually happened, as opposed to the untold other things we lost because they were deterred by the cost without people ever knowing that they would have existed.
> At that point, they chose to take them down.
And then everyone lost access to the videos -- including the hearing impaired, who might otherwise have built a support community to caption videos like these, or come together to pay someone to do it, or spurred faster development of automated captioning software etc.
Are you defending the outcome?
UC Berkeley's actions were definitely an unintended consequence. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it suggests the ADA is broken. Reading over the DOJ letter[0] to UC Berkeley, it seems like the decision was the result of a few years of laxity on the school's part despite the knowledge that the content had to be made accessible, as noted in school guidelines and policy quoted by the DOJ. Berkeley had the resources to help faculty with making their online content accessible, but it was up to the faculty members to avail themselves of it. Had the school done more to monitor compliance (and it would probably be a simple enough thing to automate) from the beginning, they'd have avoided the entire mess.
As it is, they have years of content and thousands of videos, PDFs/slideshows/supplementals, and more that needs to be sorted and reworked to meet WCAG standards. What might have been manageable as it was produced is now a massive project that would strain their resources to the breaking point. Deleting them absolutely sucks, but I can see the business logic behind the decision even if the idea of just deleting such a wealth of knowledge offends me on an intellectual level. Could they have found a way to orphan most of the content online, no longer under UC Berkeley's control? I don't know. That said, the situation seems to have been a rather unique largely the result of the school's approach to compliance monitoring.
0. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/dealing-with-d...
1. https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
That's not really true. Under the ADA, buildings built before 1992 are generally not required to perform renovations for compliance unless they are already performing renovations, at which point they are required to adherence to the requirements. And the amount that they are required to spend on compliance is a function of the amount that they are spending on the other renovations.
It's actually more complicated than that, because there are two sets of requirements (1993 and 2010), with different safe harbor provisions for each, and renovations to old buildings may or may not invalidate the 1993 safe harbor, but that's the general idea.