While I sympathize with the disdain everyone has for these guys, this judgement is the result of some lawyers that took several possibly illegal shortcuts. This case sets no precedents about the viability of copyright trolling going forward, and in fact the judge's obvious bias may serve as grounds for a successful appeal in this case. So, while this makes for amusing reading, at the end of the day it won't mean much. Everyone should still CYA when downloading torrents.
Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#22I hope all the people who paid to settle get their money back with extra damages.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#23Is there now any way that Judge Wright might turn his eye (and hopefully his hammer) on patent trolling? The arguments he makes against Prenda's process in general - not the illegal parts, but the intent and procedure - is pretty much what the patent trolling industry does. If he sees something that he pass commentary on in a legal capacity, then I'm sure courts can and should take note that they're being played in the patent game too.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#24Is there now any way that Judge Wright might turn his eye (and hopefully his hammer) on patent trolling? The arguments he makes against Prenda's process in general - not the illegal parts, but the intent and procedure - is pretty much what the patent trolling industry does. If he sees something that he pass commentary on in a legal capacity, then I'm sure courts can and should take note that they're being played in t…
> I. INTRODUCTION
> Plaintiffs1 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.
> Plaintiffs do have a right to assert their intellectual-property rights, so long as
> they do it right. But Plaintiffs’ filing of cases using the same boilerplate complaint
> against dozens of defendants raised the Court’s alert. It was when the Court realized
> Plaintiffs engaged their cloak of shell companies and fraud that the Court went to
> battlestations.
Right at the top. Looks exactly like a writeup about patent trolling except for the porn part.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#25Holy smokes. That is some serious smack down. One hopes it causes the entire judiciary to awaken to this dark scourge of extortion through the courts.
My first reaction was "daaaammmnnnn".
Second reaction was to call a lawyer friend to confirm my first reaction.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#26Now for the patent trolls.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#27What confuses me is that the only stuff they got smacked for was deficiency in how they operated, not anything fundamental to the business of copyright trolling. Another group of lawyers could easily do exactly this, while maintaining more arms-length relationships with the copyright owners, and not taking shortcuts on the cases, and be completely within the law.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#28Confused -- Why all the rigamarole, instead of going RIAA-style after the thousands-to-millions of actual porn copyright-infringers?
I'm not sure what you're asking, but Prenda's lawsuits sound very RIAA-style to me (although it's not clear that any of the settlement money ever went back to the porn makers). I assume Prenda didn't just make up the IP addresses they were suing, although that doesn't mean their defendants actually torrented the porn in question either.
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#29Is there now any way that Judge Wright might turn his eye (and hopefully his hammer) on patent trolling? The arguments he makes against Prenda's process in general - not the illegal parts, but the intent and procedure - is pretty much what the patent trolling industry does. If he sees something that he pass commentary on in a legal capacity, then I'm sure courts can and should take note that they're being played in t…
A judge is not a free agent; they can only rule on the cases they're assigned.
Moreover, what got this judge's goat was specifically "the illegal parts" of what Prenda was doing, most notably repeatedly lying in court. It wasn't the tangled ownership structure (a feature they share with some of the trolls in the news, like, say, Lodsys), but specific lies they told about it.
(The reason the ownership mattered in the Prenda case is that the lawyers and the owners were one and the same, which is against some court rules. Whoever owns Lodsys, it's pretty clearly not the attorneys representing them in court. And the lies about the ownership structure were not necessarily the most extravagant or significant --- Judge Wright also has a lot to say about misrepresentations of evidence, etc.)
Re: Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
#30What confuses me is that the only stuff they got smacked for was deficiency in how they operated, not anything fundamental to the business of copyright trolling. Another group of lawyers could easily do exactly this, while maintaining more arms-length relationships with the copyright owners, and not taking shortcuts on the cases, and be completely within the law.
That was the only thing they could be smacked for, so the judge smacked hard. It is possible to conduct this extortion within the law and that is a problem, but judges can't change law. Notice has now been sent however that if you're going to flaunt the law's deficiencies for personal gain at the expense of the legal commons, you damn well better bring your A game.