Crim charges slapped on copyright trolls who filmed porn, torrented it then sued downloaders More than a dozen criminal charges have been filed against Prenda Law lawyers, who are accused of using porno movies to extort millions of dollars from victims. Attorneys Paul Hansmeier and John Steele have each been charged in a US federal indictment with ten counts of wire fraud, five counts of mail fraud, and one count each …
"The conduct of these defendants was outrageous – they used deceptive lawsuits and unsuspecting judges to extort millions from vulnerable defendants," - Again.
"Our courts are halls of justice where fairness and the rule of law triumph, and my office will use every available resource to stop corrupt lawyers from abusing our system of justice." - Again.
So can we expect another article in another state in 2019 ? Here's a radical idea; change the law allowing prosecution of individuals and make threatening legal letters "extorting money with menaces".
It can't be done. The RIAA and the MPAA would have huge piles of lawyers out of a job, and unable to make the payments on their summer homes! The money also goes to paying bribes, er lobbying gifts, to the people who make the laws that could stop them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I don't get it: The RIAA and MPAA have been doing this for the better part of a decade. We've got major corporations suing each other over bevels on devices. We're flushing billions of dollars down the drain a year because we don't want IP and patent reform, and by we, I mean our infallable meat bags in office. And don't even get me started on 'pharma bro' and the nationwide shortages of critical medications because someone wanted a billion percent markup.
But we're going to go after a bunch of law students for doing the same thing all these other actors are doing in our legal system? What am I supposed to believe, that they weren't "too big to fail" so down comes the ban hammer? This isn't justice, it's a joke. It's selective enforcement. And if the law isn't applied equally to everyone, the law has no value. It's worse than vigilantism at that point, because we've thrown the rule of law to the wolves.
I don't get it:
What these guys did is leaking it online via a pretend hack. That is the fraud part. They went in at least one case as far as to get the pretend hack part to police and court. That bit of overdoing was what undid them.
Some RIAA and MPAA members had "leaks" and seeded torrents initially too. They abandoned the practice based on legal advice - this is an entrapment in most legislations and courts did not look at it kindly.
For their purposes it is also unnecessary - there is more than enough torrents floating around for them to plug in a heavily modified client and listen on the network chatter collecting participating IPs. In fact, the average time until your IP is recorded after joining a torrent is ~ 12 minutes if memory serves me right. So from there on, they can wait until enough evidence is accumulated against a person and deep six you with an infringement notice.
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> Go read Ken White's account ...
+1
Here is the link to the latest of Ken's articles, which the good Dr Syntax unaccountably failed to supply.
Needless to say, this latest shot from the government could prove hard to swallow for Prenda's former ringleaders.
Another fine money shot at the end of a Reg article. And also something this loathsome pair might have to get used to if they're sent down for that long list of crimes.
"The US Department of Justice said that the attorneys either purchased the rights to or recorded their own smut scenes and then deliberately seeded"
Perhaps the attorneys in the smut scenes were identifiable?
"How did they get caught? Surely they didn't upload it from their own computers? Rookie mistake, scumbags." Indeed, it does seem a quite clever scheme, just poorly implemented. I'm guessing their lack of forethought was due to thinking how could anyone resist the blackmail, the threat of being exposed as a giant, free-loading, immoral perv to their friends and family?
But then someone from Hollywood downloaded the pr0n....
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Gaming the justice system is sociopathic behaviour. Gotta be.
OK, maybe not technically, but in the lay sense. There should be harsh penalties for using the justice system's own operations and attributes instrumentally e.g. by using it as a proxy bully/muscle, or as a 'weapon'. Self-defence is a universal, inalienable right. And the courts need to be in a position to exercise that right against 'disruptive innovation' within the whole justice system.
Thumbs down didn't mean 'kill the defeated gladiator'.
Hiding the thumb in the fist ( pollice compresso, “compressed thumb” ) was the sign to spare the defeated gladiator's life, and pollice verso, “turned thumb”, was the sign for death, but no-one knows what pollice verso actually looked like, as no classical record of it exists.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/10/give-thumbs-gesture-get-start/
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."*
The threads connected to articles about this in the US itself make very entertaining reading.
eg. This from Arstechnica:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/breaking-prenda-law-copyright-trolls-steele-and-hansmeier-arrested/
*Wordsworth.
There are a lot of music album videos on Youtube. Programs called "downloaders" allow one to convert the stream provided by youtube to .MP4 or .FLV. IANAL, but the crystallization of a stream into a file may have legal implications in some jurisdictions. But since that transformation takes place via a program on one's own computer, away from prying eyes, many may feel at ease with the consequences.
The video portion of many of these music albums is simply a single image. This suggests, might the user strip away the video and remain with a pure-audio format such as .MP3 or even .FLAC? For later listening-only pleasure. It's an old concept, and some computers may have de-muxing or ripping software already installed. But I see that the standard way to obtain an MP3 from a video is not on your own computer. There are dozens of on-line converters. You paste the youtube video URL then moments later download the music. There are even sites which tell you how to do this. How late I am to the game is evidenced by this never having entered my mind, and it's now almost 2017. But the bell started going ding-ding-ding in that mind. So a third-party has your IP address and full knowledge of the music album which you, ah, commandeered, from youtube. Isn't that asking for copyright troll trouble? Are they saving up all the data for one almighty pain purge? Trolls are trolls, after all. And the method used is far simpler than the ones in this story.
Might a VPN help, or at least make you a more complex target? If there were an inkling of possible pain, users would do what they've always done, which is to rip the files on their own computer. Purely for education, I tried doing an .MP4 to .MP3 conversion in VLC 2.2.4 over Win7. It didn't fully work. But foobar 2000 did. You don't even need specialized ripping software. A free program that you might already have on your computer to play music will suffice. Although the first iteration is more complex than ^find ^copy ^paste, subsequent rips should be almost that simple.
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