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The thing is, they aren't really getting in trouble for the original scheme, which is essentially to sue on behalf of a porn studio for copyright infringement,
by smackfu 14y ago
The thing is, they aren't really getting in trouble for the original scheme, which is essentially to sue on behalf of a porn studio for copyright infringement, to join a lot of IPs in a single case in order to save on filing fees, and then to make a lot of money on small settlements. That is still pretty viable, although a lot of judges now are getting reluctant to turn those massive list of IPs into names.
They seem to be running into trouble mainly because they decided that it would be much easier to be their own client: have a shell company purchase the porn video and take 100% of the settlements. But then that runs into issues with attorney-client separation, and then they used some appropriated names on the shell company to limit the paper trail, and suddenly there is real trouble brewing.
- commandar 14y ago>That is still pretty viable, although a lot of judges now are getting reluctant to turn those massive list of IPs into names. Actually, the judge in this case was shooting down their reasoning for obtaining the identity connected to a single IP, had halted discovery until they could provide a basis for it, and specifically called out what they were doing as abusing the courts to extort defendants. Prenda then moved to dismiss the case in February, but the defending lawyer had already let the cat out of the bag about all the other shenangians Prenda was engaged in, and the judge started digging into possible misconduct from there. Their business model was already in trouble if the statements the judge had made to that point are any indication, but things got really bad for them when it turned out they were pulling all kinds of other shady things behind the scenes.