Copyright trolls....
When will authors of copyrighted works get compensation for the time they spend creating those works? It seems there exists huge underground group of people who spend time creating copyrighted works, but without any money flowing to their direction associated with the works. While this can be considered a side-effect of competition, it also has a copyright aspect in it. While it has been known for long time in copyright industry that money is outdated concept, the food industry disagrees, putting forwarrd-looking people into poverty.
These copyright-trolls figured out how to turn their copyrighted works into good use and extract settlement money from the users. This kind of innovation is what copyright area needs, clear business models that have chance of getting enough money from the users that authors can make a living out of it. Sadly their reasons of why the trolls are entitled their money wasn't exactly good enough for the courts, and the extortion business model was slightly illegal, but still these kinds of nice money-making schemes are needed in the copyright area.
This ruling has two significant problems clearly visible. First these prenda law folks clearly had trouble getting end users to actually use their copyrighted work. Their smut films was clearly positioned for certain kinds of end users, so their decision to distribute it in pirate sites themselves was clearly obvious solution to the problem of finding new end users. Their decision to sue the end users if settlement money is not received early enough, had obvious flaw that end users could invoke "implicit license" keywords to get past their copyright lawsuit and receive lawyers fees from the prenda plaintiffs.
The full scheme these trolls invoked had all the elements of a classic criminal organisation. The money was being shuffled between differrent companies to hide the original source of the moeny was their illegal extortion business of copyrighted works that they had filmed themselves. The lawyers spend significant amount of time to make it appear as if they were just executing orders that their clients had commissioned, but it turned out the clients didn't exist and the whole operation was ran by the lawyers themselves.
Guess the courts had tons of fun untangling this operation. Their patience in spending years for this is the real giveaway in this story.