Copyright trolls feel wrath of Khan, Klingons, Romulans, and Starfleet

Decisions of the federal courts rarely make for riveting sci-fi reading, but the Prenda case is an exception. Earlier this week U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II handed down a blistering decision against alleged porn trolls Prenda Law and its principals John Steele, Paul Duffy, Paul Hansmeier, and Brett Gibbs.

The Prenda case is a classic demonstration of how easily copyright law can be abused by parties with strong financial motives and no scruples whatsoever. Here’s how this scam worked.

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Prenda buys up copyrights to a handful of porn movies. It then creates shell corporations that “own” the copyrights. It hires a hand-puppet attorney (Gibbs) to represent said shell corporations. It lurks on BitTorrent networks collecting the IP addresses of people who download the porn files, then issues a subpoena to their ISP demanding their names and addresses.

Hand puppet then sends a cease-and-desist letter to the downloaders offering to settle the case out of court for $4,000, or slightly less than the minimum cost of hiring a lawyer and defending themselves. The vast majority of downloaders decide they’d rather pay than admit to being porn fiends in court. If someone challenges the law firm, they quickly drop the suit and move on to the next victim.

They then repeat the process thousands of times, netting millions of dollars, all tax-free.

Prenda goes where RIAA has gone before

If that MO sounds eerily familiar, that’s because most of it was taken directly from the playbook of the RIAA, which used similar tactics against music and movie file swappers for years (though the RIAA’s average settlement was closer to $3,000).

Judge Wright was having none of that. He gave Prenda a galaxy-class smackdown, accused the attorneys of fraud, urged the FBI to prosecute them under the RICO act, the IRS to investigate them for tax evasion, and their respective state and federal bars to revoke their shyster credentials. He wrote:

Plaintiffs have outmaneuvered the legal system. They’ve discovered the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs. And they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle — for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.

It gets better. Wright found that Prenda pretended to have carried out exhaustive investigations, but filed nearly identical complaints in each of the thousands of cases. When pressed for proof of copyright violations, it falsified evidence about the alleged porn swappers. It assigned copyright for one porn epic to Steele’s gardener, making him CEO of one of its bogus shell companies by forging his signature on the legal documents.

All rise for the Trekkie judge

The best part? Aside from its scathing tone, Wright’s decision is peppered with “Star Trek” references. It begins with a quote from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and includes this gem:

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.

Or he could just transport them all into the nearest black hole. As Popehat blogger Ken Smith White writes:

Referring to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the IRS’s [Criminal Investigation Division] is like siccing both the Klingons and the Romulans on Prenda, except that the Romulans have a somewhat better grasp of due process than IRS CID.

The entire history of this case is just as fun, if you have a week or so free to read it. In this space opera, Prenda is less like the Borg and more like the Ferengi.

Of course, Prenda has vowed to appeal. But what else would you expect from a bunch of guys who called the Electronic Frontier Foundation a “left-wing terrorist group” for helping some of Prenda’s victims? There might yet be a sequel, but it doesn’t look like Prenda Law is likely to live long or prosper.

Prenda Law — phasers set on stun or kill? Issue your judgments below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Copyright trolls feel wrath of Khan, Klingons, Romulans, and Starfleet,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.