Many judges unknowingly helped Prenda Law commit fraud but black California judge and retired marine Otis Wright smelled a rat and that was that, the beginning of the end.
Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam
It was a simple plan: obtain the rights to pornographic films, share copies of them online, then threaten to sue those downloading the skin flicks for copyright infringement unless they paid a $3,000 settlement fee. Between 2011 and 2014, the scaper earned about $3m for two former Minnesota attorneys, Paul R. Hansmeier and …
COMMENTS
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Sunday 16th June 2019 17:54 GMT Rob Willett
Agreed - Why black
I've been following this and the SCO nonsense from the start.
I've read the judges comments and never wondered if he was black, white, gay or straight. Don't care to be honest.
The judge did the right thing. The colour (spelt correctly) of his skin is immaterial.
Would you have said the White judge?
Rob
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Monday 17th June 2019 17:27 GMT martinusher
There isn't really anything called an ex-Marine
>Why have you not made a similar comment regarding the description "ex-marine"?
The Marine Corps have some peculiarities. One is that their standards of dress and personal conduct apply regardless of whether their actively serving or not. Because of this there really isn't anything called an 'ex-marine', you join effectively for life, so an ex-marine might be expected to be just a bit more honest and upstanding than average.
Color does raise some thorny issues; it really isn't the same as 'colour' in the UK. In the UK when we meet a black dude from the US our first thought is just "American". Despite years of social change in the US there are still large segments of US society that have a problem with this -- Negros are tolerated by them provided they know their place (and their place definitely isn't in the White House serving as President!). The first time you come across this attitude is quite mindblowing -- you don't think it can be real but there it is, right in front of you.
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Monday 17th June 2019 20:43 GMT Andromeda451
Re: There isn't really anything called an ex-Marine
I disagree , if you peruse the main stream media you'd swear the USA is falling apart due to some 'ism, take your pick. No we are not falling apart and the fact we had a black president with Mr. Obama points to the progress the USA has made. As an American when I see a black man I see a fellow citizen, he has to prove to be an ar$e before being pigeonholed.
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Monday 17th June 2019 20:44 GMT John Doe 12
@Cynic_999 - Because his skin colour has absolutely no bearing on his skill set - whereas being an ex-marine just MIGHT have an influence of how he thinks / behaves. I also didn't raise hackles about him being referred to as a judge for the same reason.
If you cannot see the difference between the two things then this is a sad reflection on your own upbringing. I was raised by a father who was racist, sexist, hated Jews and just about everything else it's fashionable to hate - and even I can see this is wrong.
I guess 63 thumbs up and only 2 thumbs down (as I am typing this) shows I am not the only one who thinks this way.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 10:05 GMT chivo243
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
I was wondering along the same lines, sort of... But I see headlines about violent offenders(killers, rapists) getting far less time in the US. Seems there is a huge disparity in how sentences are calculated and assigned, I guess chalk this up to Judges being people, people with an agenda (their own or someone else's)?
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Saturday 15th June 2019 12:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
I was wondering along the same lines, sort of... But I see headlines about violent offenders(killers, rapists) getting far less time in the US.
The laws differ a lot from state to state, but there's a difference between involuntary manslaughter through negligence, premeditated murder, or vehicular homicide. (amongst many other types of killing)
Each have usually the minimum and maximum sentence codified and it may be upon the judge to balance the sentence. The upper limit is for the most heinous of acts.
Seems there is a huge disparity in how sentences are calculated and assigned, I guess chalk this up to Judges being people, people with an agenda
The prosecution and defence may strike a deal before a sentence is given. The judges are of course bound by the laws - if a certain type of crime has a maximum prison time, they cannot issue more than that.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 13:52 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
Seems there is a huge disparity in how sentences are calculated and assigned, I guess chalk this up to Judges being people, people with an agenda
Theoretically it's to uphold the law, because the law relies on the public obeying it, and believe that the system is fair. Standard challenge for government and politicians because that relies on the public trust, and there are more of us than there are law enforcement.
OK, so there are a lot of lawyers in the US, but they're also expected to uphold the law given they're a pretty integral part of the system.. So generally take a dim view of lawyers abusing the system & bringing the legal profession into disrepute.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 13:41 GMT a_yank_lurker
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
Most computer crime sentences are at the feral level as they often involve interstate and international activities. Feral sentences for computer crimes is harsh compared to other sentences. However, many crimes are handled at the state level. Here state law determines the sentence and state sentences are all over the place for harshness for the same crime. Some criminals manage to get both feral and state charges and often the charge with the harshest sentence will be tried (often the feral charges are harsher).
This quirk is because the states have considerable leeway in defining what is a crime within there borders and the sentences that can be imposed.
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Monday 17th June 2019 09:37 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
The word you are looking for is federal (of, or pertaining to a federation). Feral means something quite different (i.e. "he was maimed by the feral donkey"); unless you were trying to make some sort of point by deliberately misusing the word, in which case, I'm not quite sure what your point is?
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Monday 17th June 2019 10:38 GMT Is It Me
Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.
It seems some of the Americans that comment seem to think it is amusing to refer to anything Federal as feral.
Everyone's favourite troll (Bombastic Bob) was the one where I first noticed that it happens constantly.
I do wonder if they have it set as an auto-correct in their spell checkers.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 05:17 GMT Chris Miller
Scaper?
A Florida dialect word for 'rascal', according to Wiktionary. That's increased my vocab by one :)
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Saturday 15th June 2019 05:40 GMT JassMan
Who says crime dorsn't pay?
He 'earned' $3M but only had to pay back $1.5M. 168 months in prison still makes him almost $9K/ month. I know a lot of people who could live quite happily on that. He should have been forced to pay back in full with interest and a loading for emotional stress.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 09:02 GMT eldakka
Re: Who says crime dorsn't pay?
He didn't make $3m:
Between 2011 and 2014, the scaper earned about $3m for two former Minnesota attorneys, Paul R. Hansmeier and John L. Steele,
Beween the 2 of them they made $3m, assuming an even split that'd be $1.5m each, which is how much he has to pay back.
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Saturday 15th June 2019 10:05 GMT Nick Kew
Talking of which ...
This is akin to a constant issue with software, where holders of patents (or other intellectual property) may seek to sneak something in to widely-used products, then sue for infringement.
Serious developers have strong legal safeguards and audit trails, such as the legal agreements you sign before you get access to commit or contribute to a repo.
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Monday 17th June 2019 07:39 GMT Sandtitz
Re: Talking of which ...
> "This is akin to a constant issue with software, where holders of patents (or other intellectual property) may seek to sneak something in to widely-used products, then sue for infringement."
'Has this happened often?'
Often enough to have a specific name
Quite, but has there been many software issues where copyrighted code has been intentionally planted?
Nick Kew mentioned the GIF format, but the LZW compression patent was granted before Compuserve created GIF and the patent was already licensed to other organizations.
SCO claimed copyright infringement, but they didn't sneak anything into Linux kernel code, as far as I'm aware.
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Monday 17th June 2019 10:12 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Talking of which ...
Nick Kew mentioned the GIF format, but
Nick Kew was recollecting off the top of his head. If it had been a more serious issue - for example, if it was going into a book, or if I was due to give evidence in court, I'd have given it more time and effort. In the case of GIF, it became an issue when GIF became a standard for images on the Web. It's true that wasn't an ambush, but for millions of web users putting up pages in a more innocent age, GIF was just something we used without a thought to having to licence the format.
As for SCO, that's a complicated story (even the name itself originally belonged to a different company), but the company that became SCO was itself a Linux distributor and wannabe-Redhat in the 1990s, before it fell into the hands of pirates who saw more money in extortion than in honest work.
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Monday 17th June 2019 20:09 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Talking of which ...
the company that became SCO was itself a Linux distributor and wannabe-Redhat in the 1990s
Caldera / The SCO Group only used the "SCO" name (without "The" and "Group") very briefly. Caldera was the "Linux distributor" you refer to. The real SCO used that name from 1979 through 2001, at which point it sold the OpenServer and UnixWare product lines and the UNIX IP to Caldera and renamed itself "Tarantella" (and was soon after absorbed into Sun and then Oracle).
So it's better to write "the company that became The SCO Group", to avoid confusion.
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Sunday 16th June 2019 00:47 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Talking of which ...
There have been a few very silly cases (like BT and the hyperlink, or I-forget-who and XOR, or the now-expired GIF or Compress/Zip patents), and a lot of FUD. Most famously SCO, which might have profoundly affected our history if Novell and IBM hadn't stood up to them over many years in court. For a long time (perhaps even today in some dark places), corporate lawyers would look very suspiciously on *any* open source, for fear of submarine patents. Major open source foundations - like Apache and Mozilla - have been in the vanguard of protecting our developers and users.
Ironically while all the focus was on SCO and Linux (and by extension/FUD, open source in general), it was MS who really came a cropper.
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Sunday 16th June 2019 10:30 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Talking of which ...
"Ironically while all the focus was on SCO and Linux (and by extension/FUD, open source in general), it was MS who really came a cropper."
What happened to that one eventually? AFAICS it seems to amount to "let's pull data out of a transaction database into a reporting database and patent the idea".
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Monday 17th June 2019 09:56 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Talking of which ...
I don't know the ending in the particular, except in that it led eventually to MS declaring that it would indemnify folks in future against patent violations in MS products. My main recollection of it was of reports that some third-parties had been stung and actually paid some very large sums to Timeline before that happened. Which seemed particularly ironic at a time when the FUD was telling the corporate world that was a risk with Linux.
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Sunday 16th June 2019 11:38 GMT Ken Hagan
Is there a lawyer in the house?
I'm puzzled. If it was legal for them to distribute these videos via Pirate Bay then presumably it was legal for others to download them once there. If it wasn't legal to put them there (*), surely they are opening themselves up to a much larger lawsuit from the actual copyright holders.
Also, is this not a possible defence for the downloaders? If, for example, I buy a CD on the High Street and I later find out that it is counterfeit then, yes, I have a duty to stop using the CD, seek compensation from the shop, and inform the police. However, if I do all those things then I would not expect the copyright owner to have much of a case against me. (Mens Rea and all that.)
(* I'm guessing it wasn't, since the music industry has spent about 30 years trying to enforce this very point.)
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Sunday 16th June 2019 15:45 GMT Paper
Re: Is there a lawyer in the house?
The situation is more like this: You tell your wife you're popping out for milk, but meanwhile you pop down a back ally where a masked man freely gives you a penguin fury porn DVD. You know you should probably pay, but it's already free everywhere else (Pornhub etc), and you just wanna see the HD version.
Meanwhile, the masked man actually owns the penguin fury porn. He then calls the authorities who sniff around and hear you m*sturbating to the penguin fury porn (who needs privacy?), and you get a letter either to pay up for "illegally obtaining said porn" or to go to court.
Given you don't want your wife, or community, to know - you just pay the $3k rather than reveal your penguin fury porn fetish.
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Monday 17th June 2019 02:50 GMT Updraft102
Re: Is there a lawyer in the house?
. If it was legal for them to distribute these videos via Pirate Bay then presumably it was legal for others to download them once there.
This. I am not a lawyer, but the way I see it is this: If the perpetrators of this scam are, in fact, the copyright holder for the films, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to upload the films to Pirate Bay, just as it is lawful for a music band or their record company to upload copyrighted music videos to Youtube (while anyone else that does so is in violation of the copyright). It is their right as the owner of the IP to upload them anywhere they wish.
It would then not be an infringement for anyone to download them, as the copyright owner had placed them there knowing that this would happen. They knew that was what Pirate Bay does, and the word "Pirate" in the title doesn't automatically make any download from that site piracy. It's the lack of permission from the copyright holder that makes it piracy, and in this case, the copyright holder was the one doing it.
As such, this is really a fraud case... the lawyers fraudulently claimed copyright violations that they knew, or should have known, did not exist. The copyright holders used TPB as a distribution site for their film, then tried to con people who downloaded it into paying. The victims of this scam didn't know that they hadn't, in fact, pirated the film, but the perpetrators of the scam did know that, or they should have.
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Sunday 16th June 2019 20:11 GMT Fatman
About f-----g time!!!!
I hope the judge, when Steele gets sentenced, gives Steele the maximum allowed by law.
Steele (and Hamsmeier) deserves to have everything they own seized and sold off to pay any restitution ordered, and upon their release from prison, they get the clothes on their backs, and that proverbial 'pot to p--s in'. Not one thing more. Screw them any way you can.
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Monday 17th June 2019 00:12 GMT Jaap Aap
Huh? I don't get it.
Couldn't they have done this within the law? If they legally obtained the copyright, and used a torrent application to find out who wanted it, what's illegal about that? It's not that your torrent application goes looking for just anything, you'd have to tell it to download some nasty '70s german scheisse porno.
If they would have done this part different, and disclosed their financial interests, would it be the same situation?
"They would then file copyright lawsuits to obtain personal information about those downloaded their hardcore flicks using subpoenas obtained from courts without any disclosure of their financial interest in the lawsuits."
Let's say I'm the owner/copyright holder of the XXX-rated title "bambi and the teenager covered in maple syrup". I've found out the information about a couple of people who want to download this piece of filth without paying me. We want to settle "out of court for an undisclosed sum". Isn't this the same?
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Monday 17th June 2019 03:54 GMT Updraft102
Not a lawyer, standard disclaimers apply, just my take here.
Couldn't they have done this within the law? If they legally obtained the copyright, and used a torrent application to find out who wanted it, what's illegal about that?
Nothing, and that's the point. If the copyright owner is the one who uploaded it to a given site, it means the copyright owner is okay with it being on that site. They know that it's going to be downloaded by anyone and everyone, since widespread distribution is the purpose of the site, and they uploaded it anyway, giving the entire process their stamp of approval. That makes it fraudulent to claim that downloaders were in violation of a copyright.
If the copyright holders had disclosed that it was they who posted the film for download, and they had worded their threat in such a way to not directly claim that a copyright violation had occurred (perhaps by saying that the downloader had demonstrated intent to download the file unlawfully, without ever saying that it was unlawful), and had offered to settle the matter out of court for x dollars, that may have worked.
In that case, the copyright holders never would have made a fraudulent claim that there was a copyright violation when there clearly was not... they would have simply offered to settle a dispute without court, as people do all the time for things that are not actually violations of law or torts. The fact that there was no violation of anyone's rights doesn't matter if both parties agree to the settlement... that's the point of settling matters out of court. It's courts that decide what rights have been violated and what the remedy should be.
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Monday 17th June 2019 09:47 GMT Loyal Commenter
There's a further subtlety here - they may have known the IP addresses of the people downloading the films, but the only way they could get the names and addresses associated with those IP addresses was to obtain them through law enforcement channels - there is no legitimate way of doing this if the people downloading the videos weren't actually infinging the copyright, so they did so fraudulently, by claiming that their copyright was being infringed when they knew full well that they were the ones distributing the videos for free via a torrent site in the first place.
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Monday 17th June 2019 12:21 GMT Chris Malme
There's more
There was more - as this article says, the plea-deal allowed them to avoid the 16 other charges.
In particular, from an earlier Register article:
After that [uploading to Pirate Bay], the legal eagles allegedly created a sham "hacking" case in which they recruited people who pretended to be some hackers who obtained and leaked the porno movies online. That allowed the Prenda team to convince a court to subpoena ISPs to get the identities of people who downloaded the files as part of the discovery process while prosecuting the stooge hackers.
Also worth noting that they made $3m apiece - the con netted $6m between 2011 and 2014. However, they had already been relieved of a lot of the profits in the civil court. This latest case was about the criminal charges.
Do a search on The Register for Prenda Law, if you are interested.
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