Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order

They have to pay attorney fees of about 40 grand, and another 40 grand of punitive damages. At this point, that's about it, but with a ruling like this, there's no doubt that there are going to be many more problems for the Prenda gang in the future. Don't worry though, given the gravity of the recommendations Wright's sending to the DA and to the IRS, you can be certain there will be much more popcorn to be had from this case.

Judge Wright took tremendous offense to the idea of lawyer-sharpie types trying to use his court (among others) as home base for a naked scheme of extortion.

Think about how he characterizes the lawyers and their conduct: (1) they were lawyers with failed practices; (2) they figured a way to shake down victims out of an aggregate of millions of dollars; (3) they did this by threatening to expose them as downloaders of pornographic material via the filing of lawsuits ostensibly asserting copyright violations; (4) yet, the people asserting the claims did not have any good evidence actually proving any form of violation in any given case; (5) and, when someone offered any real resistance, the case was dropped; (6) and when the ostensible holders of the claims needed to be real holders of the copyrights in question, shell entities were set up (controlled and dominated by the lawyers) in order to create a false appearance that this requirement was met; (7) and when the federal court's procedural rules specifically required the lawyer bringing the case to identify all known related cases so that the court can understand the true party relationships, the lawyer suppresses all the known facts about the relationships in order to deceive the court; (8) and when a formal assignment of copyright is needed to meet the legal requirement of standing, the lawyers set up a dummy name and forge the person's signature in order to meet the requirement; (9) and when the scheme turns on a fishing expedition by which the lawyers hunt out a list of IP addresses and then ask the court for the right to subpoena the ISP to get the names associated with those addresses, and the judge issues a discovery order saying, in effect, "hold on, you can't do this here," and yet the lawyers still proceed to serve the subpoenas on the ISPs in order to keep generating opportunities to extort settlements from even more victims; (10) and when the court finds out that the lawyers are deliberately flouting the court's orders and authority, the lawyers refuse to appear until forced to and, when they do appear, refuse to account honestly for their conduct.

Summing up and paraphrasing what the judge concluded based on these findings: This is not lawyering. It is naked extortion covered by a thin veneer of lawyering. Rules don't matter. Honesty doesn't matter. Decency doesn't matter. Whatever it takes to keep the scheme going, right or wrong, fair or foul, justified or not.

The result: not a severe money sanction, which would have been but a slap on the wrist when many millions had been gathered under the lawyers' scheme, and apparently gathered tax free to boot. Instead, something much worse, to wit, a clear conclusion that the lawyers had engaged in acts of moral turpitude, justifying referral to the state bar of every jurisdiction in which they are authorized to practice, and likely eventual disbarment; a criminal referral to the U.S. attorneys' office for possible RICO violations; a referral to the tax authorities; and an order that this devastating order be served and filed in every single legal action that has been filed by these attorneys anywhere in the nation.

This, to put it mildly, amounts to evisceration. This judge got mad. This judge had guts. This judge is smart. And that, for these lawyers, is a lethal combination.

If you give someone a basket of grenades and 5% of the time they hit friendlies, you'll probably take the basket away...

It looks exactly like a writeup about patent trolling except it doesn't have anything at all to do with patents.