Prenda Law ordered to pay $261K to defendants

The judgement on the case would probably not be much different, considering that the Prenda lawyers have also lost various other cases without naming any ISPs as defendants.

This order discusses a motion by Comcast and AT&T for attorney fees, which the judge deems appropriate because (a) Prenda unnecessarily elongated the process by naming the ISPs as co-defendants without any valid claim, and (b) as a reprimand for Prenda'a “willingness to lie to the Court” and “disregard […] of justice”.

The damages are tabulated as follows:

    Anthony Smith (main defendant)
      187.2h á $200.00/h – $409.00/h →  $72,367.00
    AT&T
      158.7h á $110.00/h – $295.00/h →  $38,987.83 + $870.29
      215.0h á $250.00/h – $555.00/h →  $80,524.50 + $864.92
                                  total $119,637.05
    Comcast
      132.0h á $212.50/h – $531.00/h →  $57,144.23 + $806.98
       36.9h á             $300.00/h →  $11,070.00
                                 total  $69,021.26

                      TOTAL JUDGEMENT: $261,025.11

So yes, Prenda would have to pay a lot less attorney fees hadn't they got the ISPs involved, and possibly even none at all, considering that the motion for fees was brought forward by the ISPs.

You can read the judgement yourself at https://ia600705.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.ilsd.58...

Well, this case is a little more disappointing than you might think. Prenda's in so much trouble because they falsely represented to the court that they had an unrelated, copyright-holding client, when in fact they held the copyright (and kept all the money) themselves. No one is challenging the model of "own the copyright to a porn movie, and then sue people who download it" (although it has also been suggested that Prenda was the source of torrents for its movies, which would complicate its claims).

This has nothing to do with patents. The article describes a case of copyright trolling, which is a completely different matter.

Of course there are similarities between copyright trolls and patent trolls: Both acquire certain rights and try to extort money out of small actors for allegedly infringing use. In both cases the troll's calculation is that the proposed settlement fee is just below the cost of an effective defense.