What's the opposite of fencing? Giving away legal merchandise advertising that it's stolen goods? I agree, analogies don't really work. The fact remains that t

What's the opposite of fencing? Giving away legal merchandise advertising that it's stolen goods? 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.