Prenda Law porn-troll saga ends with prison for founder | Hacker News Reader

Prenda Law porn-troll saga ends with prison for founder

arstechnica.com

92 points_JamesA_44 comments

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Summary (found at the end of the article) of what the founders were doing:

>Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.

>But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies' content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys' pockets.

The defendant's name is "John Steele" - I assume they were able to crack this case when they realized the copyright lawyer was also the star of all the allegedly infringed upon porno films

While doing this thing he must have thought of himself as a real stud, making money off copyright trolling and then shovelling that money into making more porn so he could get his rocks off.

The judge's order makes the sequence of the case and the methods of the defendants much clearer:

https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-O...

edit: and has numerous easter eggs for Star Trek fans.

Wow, this is one of the most hilarious court opinions I've ever seen.

"As for Van Den Hemel, Lutz, and Hansemeier, they are not without fault even though they acted under orders from the Principals. They were not merely assimilated; they knowingly participated in this scheme, reaping the benefits when the going was good."

"Third, though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage. The Court will refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California."

:)

Was Prenda making Star Trek porn?

The story is really well documented on Popehat for anyone who's interested: https://www.popehat.com/?s=prenda

This guy got fewer years than the other guy because he helped get the other guy convicted. It just seems wrong, in principle, that the law rewards that sort of behaviour. That's apart from the problems with trusting such self serving testimony.

This is the exact scenario that motivated the name of the Prisoner's Dilemma, for what it's worth.

The prisoner’s dilemma works for getting convictions at all, not necessarily fair and balanced ones. The state often needs defectors to prove their cases beyond reasonable doubt, and I would take this over the alternatives of a stronger surveillance state or a relaxed “beyond reasonable doubt” standard.

The big issue with Prisoner's Dilemma is that people lie.

Just as a for instance, consider:

https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/link-between-debra-ca...

So all across the US, in a very real way, there are times that the state puts innocent people in prison in exchange for lies told by guilty people. Worse, the state then allows those guilty people back out onto the streets to commit more crimes. This causes no end of problems in society. From crime, to the complete and total nonexistence of trust between certain communities and law enforcement. (Think about it, they know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. So if you are letting a guilty bad guy send an innocent good guy to prison, they understandably intuit that there's likely an unflattering reason that you are doing that.)

For all these reasons, and more actually, the practice should be stopped.

Your post sets up a false dichotomy. You have essentially said, "We can't have a non-corrupt system. So we should have a system where the guilty are encouraged to lie and go free rather than a system where we have surveillance everywhere catching everyone all the time."

Here's the thing though, we can have a less corrupt system. A system free of both of those practices. That's a perfectly reasonable alternative. We can have prosecutors either prove their cases with actual data based evidence rather than tainted anecdotes, or not. That's what the adversarial system intended.

I was actually hoping to not frame it as an exhaustive listing of options - just the ones I had seen in practice working. I certainly hope there aren’t more working options; I just haven’t seen them tested.

Our arcane system of punitive justice and trophy arrests and convictions has no interest in actually sponsoring or engendering good behavior.

Is obstruction of an investigation good behavior?

No, of course it isn't; I'm not sure why Trump's obstruction of Mueller's investigation is being brought up here though?

> It just seems wrong, in principle, that the law rewards that sort of behaviour

I'm not sure what sort of behavior you're referring to here. Snitching? Authorities should always reward snitching (unless it's snitching on the authorities.)

edit: probably the concept of a don being rewarded for snitching on his capos? I wholeheartedly support this. It prevents Eichmanns from giving up their agency. If you're a capo, you had better fully trust in the loyalty of your don, because a good law isn't going to enforce your criminal contract. If it did, it's basically legitimizing the relationship between criminal co-conspirators.

he didn't snitch until it was his own neck/balls in the noose. He's not a whistle blower who saw the error of his ways and tried for redemption. To get less than 1/2 the recommended sentence seems like a pretty sweet deal. His lawyer sounds like a real grease ball as well.

> Authorities should always reward snitching

Often authorities have not way of knowing if the tale told is true.

The guys in his block will find out he's a snitch. The shorter sentence may be more of a curse.

You think they're gonna throw an (ex-) lawyer in with all the thugs? Nah, it'll probably be Club Fed for Steele.

That's amazing and awesome. Pro-tip: do not get caught deliberately lying to judges. It makes them twitchy.

The article was short, but the TL;DR is that Prenda made porn videos, uploaded them to torrent sites, then sued everyone who downloaded them. $6M worth of defendants settled quickly because they didn't want to have "lost lawsuit from porn producer" on their records.

They set up byzantine shell companies to obfuscate that they actually owned the videos, and flat-out lied saying that they represented people other than themselves. When that came out, it also followed that it's not really possible to infringe copyright from someone who is seeding the torrent themselves, as they're literally publishing that content for anyone who asks for it.

I literally LOLed when I saw this headline. It took a while, but wow, the karma hammer hit hard today.

Somehow I missed the part about them making their own videos until now. Which makes it that much more ridiculous.

Partially explains why porn videos are so ridiculous and hilarious now, when they aren't just being demeaning.

I recently found this musician who just posts youtube videos of his music, but also films himself in threesomes on pornhub. The watermarked url in the video to what one might think is a paysite just redirects to his latest youtube music video.

Its fascinating how this is monetizable now, because in the past these seemed to be all separate trades that were incompatible with broader society.

Makes me kind of jealous, since the point for me was to watch someone else marginalize themselves doing what I wish I could do without marginalizing myself or having any consequence really. Now it might be the move!

Now that porn is free, it has to serve as an ad. You can be Mindgeek and paste ads all around it and between it, or you can innovate like this guy and use the content itself as an ad to advertise something else.

There's got to be an opening[sic] for a company to market lingerie and sex toys through porn distribution. Hell, why not furniture, too?

edit: honestly, with the high-end fashion photography aping of Greg Lansky product (Vixen, Blacked, Tushy) I'm surprised this isn't already a thing.

Thats actually not a bad idea. There are a lot of videos that try to focus on sensual side of things instead of the cheek clapping, they could easily double as furniture ads.

The technology on Instagram now allows for products to be tagged in and around video. (I've seen much older startups do this and fail to gain traction)

Could be added to porn sites as a different form of affiliate marketing. Let the ad track you to Facebook and around the net for more furniture or home decoration.

Might be a good time to do it since other video sites like youtube are marginalizing their entire population and many people just post to porn themed sites since they don't actually care whether a video is sex related or not. They have almost no content restrictions.

Realistically, there's so much porn online that you could post your own home made movies and no one you know would ever see them. You're a tiny drop in a massive ocean.

Unrealistic once face recognition really takes off since your could just search for someone. In fact this has already been happening.

Seeding your own torrents doesn't nullify your copyright on the content. Absent a license, nobody else can legally redistribute them.

Can you prove that the client wasn't a leech? I mean, yeah, it is possible to do that, but I bet that this law firm specifically, using the tech of ten years ago, could not.

They could run their own clients and collect a list of people seeding the video. It wouldn't be hard. A slightly smarter client could download one chunk from every client that ever connects to the torrent and log it.

I don't know if they bothered, and it seems a bit of a moot point since they just lost bigtime on the whole case.

This case is really incredible because you so rarely see copyright holders lose these cases. It might matter that they were a tiny asshole law firm and not a giant media cartel. The DMCA usually lets copyright holders get away with murder.

Not exactly relevant, but their account (sharkmp4 on TPB) also uploaded files that they are very unlikely to have had a license to distribute (to add veracity to the entrapment), not only their films.

Don’t forget about the part where they didn’t pay taxes on their settlements!

Nearly 10 years later, the lawyers go to jail. I would like to believe it means other lawyers would be less inclined to pursue these sort of extortion based models but I don't expect it will change their inclination.

If Disney had been found to be doing this with their own films, would the CEO of Disney be in jail? This case always felt extremely punitive due to the content and the size of the company.

It seems pretty agreed upon that the legal system bends towards wealthy and powerful in the US. The current Jeff Epstein scandal highlights this double standard pretty well.

That said, we should absolutely be going after the rich and powerful more than we currently do. These guys committed fraud and money laundering, significant financial crimes and potentially ruined other people's lives in the process by forcing victims into settlements of thousands of dollars. That's incredibly disgusting behavior and absolutely worthy of a significant prison sentence.

What specifically about this case makes you think they were punished too harshly?

Fun fact, the number of billionaires currently in prison is about what you’d expect statistically.

You mean given that the probability that billionaires are more likely to engage in crime?

Were they the legal owners of the copyright? Yes. Did they post the material themselves, yes. Have other companies posted their own works in slightly corrupt form to thwart pirates? I expect yes. Do other companies sue pirates for downloading their material? Yes. Do those companies typically sue for an amount less than a value which would cause the pirate to go to trial? Yes. The only difference I see is that Prenda uploaded “good” copies and sued. Had they uploaded corrupt copies, with a link to their website where you could download the files for $1, and a third party then uploaded the non-corrupt file to BitTorrent, it seems very close to what the large corporations are doing.

Taking it to the next level, someone should patent the business model of doing this, and then just sue Prenda 2.0 for violating their patent.

Again, I'm not saying that large corporations don't do stuff like this, I entirely believe that they do. What I don't understand is how that's a valid argument for why these guys got too harsh of a punishment. Just because big, powerful people get away with this stuff doesn't mean that it shouldn't be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Should laypeople not be prosecuted for the same crimes that big corporations also commit but fail to be held accountable for? Just because someone does it and gets away with it doesn't make it right. And if we excuse everyone who does what big corporations do, then what's the point of having a legal system? Sure, big corps absolutely need to be reigned in. But arguing that these guys were punished too harshly for committing crimes simply because other, more powerful people commit crimes too is illogical. If every layperson were let off on something that a rich, powerful person got away with, then there'd be no one to punish, because all behavior would be acceptable.

I agree they broke the law. I’m just trying to understand what small change needed to happen so they wouldn’t have broken the law. Paying their taxes - after Al Capone, you’d think any one skirting the law would at least cover that base. What else would they need to change?

What if Prenda just mined BitTorrent to find adult videos which were already being pirated at high volume (2 Girls, 1 Cup), and found the legal copyright holders, and bought the rights, then sued? Would that have been legal?

They evaded taxes with their out-of-court settlements, so unless they changed their settlement practices, they'd still be running afoul of the law.

Slightly off-topic, but I worry about the “you should have known better” standard that the law applies to copyright violations that allowed these folks to get away with this in the first place. The logic seems to be: everybody knows that movies you have to download from BitTorrent are only up there because they’re copyrighted, so you knew that you were engaging in piracy, so you’re guilty. In general, I agree that’s probably true - anybody who would deal with something as user-unfriendly (relative to, say, Netflix) as a torrent site probably knew they were engaging in copyright violation. On the other hand, there are enough user-friendly, ad-supported sites like crunchy roll, popcornflix, tubi TV, etc. that your average web user has no way of distinguishing rights against.

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