Summary (found at the end of the article) of what the founders were doing:<p>>Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.<p>>But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies' content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys' pockets.
The judge's order makes the sequence of the case
and the methods of the defendants much clearer:<p><a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-Order" rel="nofollow">https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-O...</a><p>edit: and has numerous easter eggs for Star Trek fans.
The story is really well documented on Popehat for anyone who's interested: <a href="https://www.popehat.com/?s=prenda" rel="nofollow">https://www.popehat.com/?s=prenda</a>
This guy got fewer years than the other guy because he helped get the other guy convicted. It just seems wrong, in principle, that the law rewards that sort of behaviour. That's apart from the problems with trusting such self serving testimony.
That's amazing and awesome. Pro-tip: do <i>not</i> get caught deliberately lying to judges. It makes them twitchy.<p>The article was short, but the TL;DR is that Prenda made porn videos, uploaded them to torrent sites, then sued everyone who downloaded them. $6M worth of defendants settled quickly because they didn't want to have "lost lawsuit from porn producer" on their records.<p>They set up byzantine shell companies to obfuscate that they actually owned the videos, and flat-out lied saying that they represented people other than themselves. When that came out, it also followed that it's not really possible to infringe copyright from someone who is seeding the torrent themselves, as they're literally publishing that content for anyone who asks for it.<p>I literally LOLed when I saw this headline. It took a while, but wow, the karma hammer hit hard today.
Nearly 10 years later, the lawyers go to jail. I would like to believe it means other lawyers would be less inclined to pursue these sort of extortion based models but I don't expect it will change their inclination.
If Disney had been found to be doing this with their own films, would the CEO of Disney be in jail? This case always felt extremely punitive due to the content and the size of the company.