Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order (opens in new tab)

2 things jump out at me:

1 - From the perpetrators' POV, this kind of white collar crime is orders of magnitude safer and more lucrative than a blue collar equivalent. This may amount to evisceration, but it's nothing compared to a judge getting angry at drug dealers turning that kind of a profit.

2 - From the victims' POV (or at least many of them), the lawyer-extortionist, defense lawyers, laws & judges are all really part of the same "system." It's the system that is abusing them. The judge has tried to make it clear that it's the perpetrators abusing the system, but I wonder if victims feel that distinction. It sounds like a cleaned up version of this scheme might still be legal and profitable: Get actual porn copyright owners on board, pay their taxes, maybe actually litigate a case or two.

It is a real pity that it takes such naked extortionist behaviour to get a judge angry. If you look back through for instance the SCO lawsuit there were several points where I thought something like this was going to happen but it never did. Judges in general are terribly patient with plaintiff misbehaviour.

That's probably a good thing but many a life has been ruined like that.

Judge Wright definitely had phasers set to kill here. But these guys aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. Steele (AKA "BittorrentBull") was mocking Judge Wright on Twitter over a news article about his bankruptcy not very long ago. I've never seen a smart lawyer do anything like that.

In the order, I note that Judge Wright used all the most devastating magic words. In addition to discussing their "moral turpitude," as you mentioned, he also said they "defrauded the Court." Ken predicted that might happen and wrote about how important that may be later:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/02/prenda-laws-attorneys-take...

"The fraud issue is of such huge importance because there is an exception to the attorney-client privilege from discovery and testimony in cases in which the attorney is alleged to be a participant in the fraud. Even the attorney work product exception from discovery falls by the wayside in such cases."

So this order is devastating not because of the small monetary sanction. Rather, Judge Wright methodically destroyed all of their defenses, threw them to the wolves, and then rounded up every other carnivore in the country to join the wolves in taking a bite out of them.

It's interesting to me that the judge lets so much raw contempt show. I am more accustomed to judges presenting a dispassionate attitude; I always figured that this was an important part of their role of making impartial rulings in an adversarial system.

Would showing this much unmasked disgust towards one party leave a ruling more vulnerable to accusations of bias on appeal (presuming this can even be appealed)?

It is not often I derive huge amounts of amusement from legal proceedings but this case (and especially this judge) has been very fun to watch in a slow-motion train-wreck kind of way.

We all knew this judgement would be good and the judge delivered.

You can bet there are a lot of plaintiff lawyers paying attention as well.

My first reaction was "daaaammmnnnn".

Second reaction was to call a lawyer friend to confirm my first reaction.

I wonder if there was ever a movie in which the Cavalry came calling to the rescue, but went after the wrong target? I seem to recall a Twilight Zone episode (or maybe it was a Stephen King Short Story) in which an infantry platoon razed a village, only to discover that it was actually their own hometown, somehow masqueraded as some foreign land.

I willing to wager that if we looked at it with objective perspective, 95% of the time the Federal Grand Juries are doing work for good, it's only 5% of the time that they are misguided - but it's that 5% that we all seem to remember.

That was the only thing they could be smacked for, so the judge smacked hard. It is possible to conduct this extortion within the law and that is a problem, but judges can't change law. Notice has now been sent however that if you're going to flaunt the law's deficiencies for personal gain at the expense of the legal commons, you damn well better bring your A game.

This part is relevant to that:

But Plaintiffs did not conduct a sufficient investigation to determine whether that person actually downloaded enough data (or even anything at all) to produce a viewable video. Further, Plaintiffs cannot conclude whether that person spoofed the IP address, is the subscriber of that IP address, or is someone else using that subscriber’s Internet access.

The first part, proving that they downloaded a complete copy, seems to be a bit more difficult than just grabbing a snapshot of all the IPs at a point-in-time as they had been doing.

FYI, Prenda already argued that the Judge was biased in this case. The issue went before another judge, and was denied.

Source: http://ia601508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.54...

What is the judge's bias?

If you remember, the Xenomorphs survived being nuked ...

It's not uncommon, for example here's a recent double-entendre ruling about a strip club:

http://www.woai.com/media/lib/12/5/9/5/59511ba8-415b-4b2e-a7...

The lawyers out there speculated he did it as yet another smack down to Prenda law. This will always be known in law circles as the "Star Trek Order". It'll be more widely read, and the shame will always follow them.

His findings of law are correct, a little toying with them outside of his findings is quite enjoyable.

Lawyer friend told me its not uncommon so the ruling is remembered and talked about. Here are some other examples of "creative writing" http://blog.simplejustice.us/2007/08/30/texas-where-decision...

Presumably he knows the internet is watching. Perhaps he's playing to the gallery a bit.

A judge is not a free agent; they can only rule on the cases they're assigned.

Moreover, what got this judge's goat was specifically "the illegal parts" of what Prenda was doing, most notably repeatedly lying in court. It wasn't the tangled ownership structure (a feature they share with some of the trolls in the news, like, say, Lodsys), but specific lies they told about it.

(The reason the ownership mattered in the Prenda case is that the lawyers and the owners were one and the same, which is against some court rules. Whoever owns Lodsys, it's pretty clearly not the attorneys representing them in court. And the lies about the ownership structure were not necessarily the most extravagant or significant --- Judge Wright also has a lot to say about misrepresentations of evidence, etc.)

> I. INTRODUCTION > Plaintiffs1 have outmaneuvered the legal system. They’ve discovered the > nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable > defense costs. And they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally > downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum calculated to be > > 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. > Plaintiffs do have a right to assert their intellectual-property rights, so long as > they do it right. But Plaintiffs’ filing of cases using the same boilerplate complaint > against dozens of defendants raised the Court’s alert. It was when the Court realized > Plaintiffs engaged their cloak of shell companies and fraud that the Court went to > battlestations.

Right at the top. Looks exactly like a writeup about patent trolling except for the porn part.

1. They have to pay for the attorney fees with a punitive multiplier, basically double. So instead of paying 40k they have to pay 80k for this case. Other cases will likely follow suite.

2. Judge Wright says he is referring Steele, Duffy, Hansmeier, and Gibbs to their respective state bars and federal bars. They can very well be debarred from practicing law, there will be a very thorough bar investigation. This is what lawyer's nightmare are made of.

3. He is referring the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office for RICO (Racketeer act) and the IRS. This is what Hells Angels/Mafia nightmares are made of.

4. All judges that have pending cases with these lawyers will be notified of the above (and most likely more).

Worse case scenario: More attorney fee x2 (how many cases did they prosecute?) , debarred, send to jail for racketeering.

tl;dr the Judge fined them 2x and then set 3 organizations you don't want to mess with on their asses, and told everyone about it.

Well, first they have to pay the defense lawyers for their time. It's not a lot, really, but enough to compensate them. Then he stripped them of various legal defenses by finding them to be party to fraud upon the court. And he accused them of "moral turpitude" which could get them disbarred. And he sent a copy of this order to every judge they have a case before. And to every bar association. So ALL of them can go after them independently. Then he referred them for a criminal investigation, mentioning RICO. Oh, and he pointed out how they said they paid no taxes and have all these shells and mystery trusts in a tax haven, so he called in the IRS to investigate, too.

So they have to face this all over again in front of every single judge where they have a case, with every bar association they're a part of. All while facing the feds AND the IRS.

This is akin to being stripped naked and thrown to the wolves, except that Judge Wright didn't stop with wolves, he looked up every carnivore in the country and gave it a dinner invitation.

They have to pay attorney fees of about 40 grand, and another 40 grand of punitive damages. At this point, that's about it, but with a ruling like this, there's no doubt that there are going to be many more problems for the Prenda gang in the future. Don't worry though, given the gravity of the recommendations Wright's sending to the DA and to the IRS, you can be certain there will be much more popcorn to be had from this case.

Because the porn industry doesn't have the representation in DC; it doesn't have the centralized power to pursue highly expensive legal warfare; it doesn't have any sympathy vote; it has very little power; it has relatively little money compared to Hollywood or the recording industry (to attract K Street lobbyists). There is no porn industry equivalent of the RIAA.

They did go after very many people. They did these cases one at a time because it's easier to do that for them. People either paid up, or they didn't pay up in which case PrendaLaw dropped the case.

This case is awesome because they tried to do exactly that, but an alert Judge thought something not just unpleasant but actually fraudulent was going on.

What that says about all the other cases (where Prenda got millions, apparently) is open for discussion.

I think they had some trouble keeping their real porn-producer clients. Since the real clients were real parties to the suit, they could be countersued directly, which happened a couple of times. I think they ended up settling and paying out, rather than risking it.

http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2012/01/31/defendant-strikes...

I'm not sure what you're asking, but Prenda's lawsuits sound very RIAA-style to me (although it's not clear that any of the settlement money ever went back to the porn makers). I assume Prenda didn't just make up the IP addresses they were suing, although that doesn't mean their defendants actually torrented the porn in question either.

Because they (the lawyers) didn't care about copyright infringement, they just wanted settlements. Copyright trolling is typically lawyer-, not rightsholder-, driven, with no intent to take cases to court.