13 ms·

Prenda Law porn-troll saga ends with prison for founder

92 points by _JamesA_ 7y ago

Doubl 7y ago
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.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  The guys in his block will find out he's a snitch. The shorter sentence may be more of a curse.
  - coldacid 7y ago
    You think they're gonna throw an (ex-) lawyer in with all the thugs? Nah, it'll probably be Club Fed for Steele.
- schoen 7y ago
  This is the exact scenario that motivated the name of the Prisoner's Dilemma, for what it's worth.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  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.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    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-carter-denice-haraway-murder-cases-terri-holland 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.
    - mattnewton 7y ago
      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.
- dclowd9901 7y ago
  Our arcane system of punitive justice and trophy arrests and convictions has no interest in actually sponsoring or engendering good behavior.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    Is obstruction of an investigation good behavior?
    - dclowd9901 7y ago
      No, of course it isn't; I'm not sure why Trump's obstruction of Mueller's investigation is being brought up here though?
- pessimizer 7y ago
  > 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.
  - ticmasta 7y ago
    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.
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    > Authorities should always reward snitching Often authorities have not way of knowing if the tale told is true.
kstrauser 7y ago
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.
- wil421 7y ago
  Somehow I missed the part about them making their own videos until now. Which makes it that much more ridiculous.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    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!
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      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.
injb 7y ago
The story is really well documented on Popehat for anyone who's interested: https://www.popehat.com/?s=prenda https://www.popehat.com/?s=prenda
daenz 7y ago
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.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  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
  - devoply 7y ago
    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.
dmckeon 7y ago
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-Order https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-O... edit: and has numerous easter eggs for Star Trek fans.
- btown 7y ago
  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." :)
- manicdee 7y ago
  Was Prenda making Star Trek porn?
jmpman 7y ago
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.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  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?
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Fun fact, the number of billionaires currently in prison is about what you’d expect statistically.
    - ant6n 7y ago
      You mean given that the probability that billionaires are more likely to engage in crime?
  - jmpman 7y ago
    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.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
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.

92 points by _JamesA_ 7y ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
The guys in his block will find out he's a snitch. The shorter sentence may be more of a curse.
- coldacid 7y ago
  You think they're gonna throw an (ex-) lawyer in with all the thugs? Nah, it'll probably be Club Fed for Steele.
schoen 7y ago
This is the exact scenario that motivated the name of the Prisoner's Dilemma, for what it's worth.
mattnewton 7y ago
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.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  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-carter-denice-haraway-murder-cases-terri-holland 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.
  - mattnewton 7y ago
    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.
dclowd9901 7y ago
Our arcane system of punitive justice and trophy arrests and convictions has no interest in actually sponsoring or engendering good behavior.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Is obstruction of an investigation good behavior?
  - dclowd9901 7y ago
    No, of course it isn't; I'm not sure why Trump's obstruction of Mueller's investigation is being brought up here though?
pessimizer 7y ago
> 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.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  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.
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  > Authorities should always reward snitching Often authorities have not way of knowing if the tale told is true.

kstrauser 7y ago

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.

wil421 7y ago
Somehow I missed the part about them making their own videos until now. Which makes it that much more ridiculous.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  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!
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    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.

injb 7y ago

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

daenz 7y ago

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.

ticmasta 7y ago
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
- devoply 7y ago
  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.

dmckeon 7y ago

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-Order https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-O... edit: and has numerous easter eggs for Star Trek fans.

btown 7y ago
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." :)
manicdee 7y ago
Was Prenda making Star Trek porn?

jmpman 7y ago

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.

save_ferris 7y ago
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?
- rayiner 7y ago
  Fun fact, the number of billionaires currently in prison is about what you’d expect statistically.
  - ant6n 7y ago
    You mean given that the probability that billionaires are more likely to engage in crime?
- jmpman 7y ago
  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.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

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.