Porn trolling mastermind is the world’s most evasive witness Prenda-linked lawyer testifies for seven hours, gives no useful information.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/leading-porn-trol...
Anyhow, I get the feeling that these guys are being too clever by half and that the judge is about to make them answer for it. Thankfully, Ars has promised a reporter on the scene. Personally, I'm betting that they come up with some lame excuse for a no show, but we'll see.
HN needs subheads! They could be slightly more tolerant of pulling out salient details or interpretation, and even wiki-rewritable by users over a certain karma, with a version history. They'd make the 'original title' policy more tolerable, and be a massive timesaver for readers, when they provide the necessary counterbalance (in details or qualifications) for whatever sensational or dry choice was made in the title. (Popehat writeups could win with a good subhed; 'trick' titles would lose when the subhed offers the necessary clarification.)
It seems like they originally did have proper contracts to sue on behalf of porn studios, with the porn studios getting a cut of the settlements. Then that well dried up, due to a combination of factors like very slow moving cases and a few nasty countersuits against the porn studio owners that had to be settled for cash going the wrong way.
It's only at that point where they decided they could just buy the copyrights to films directly, and get rid of the pesky clients.
Here's a starting point: http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-...
This is a rare instance in which Torrentfreak may be covering a story accurately, although don't race to pat them on the back for that because this does seem to be a case in which copyrights are being prosecuted by parodically conceived comic book supervillains.
As Popehat reports it, what seems to have happened is this:
* A small law firm in Chicago, through a series of shell transactions, acquired the rights to some porn properties.
* The firm began running a variant of the movie studio lawsuit playbook on people it determined had shared those files over the Internet.
* The firm did not disclose to the court that it had a direct interest in the media properties, instead representing that it was counsel for 3rd party firms that owned the properties (this is technically true, but wait...).
* Another attorney, Morgan Prietz, began inquiries into these suits, smelled a rat, and started collecting evidence.
* Among the evidence discovered: one of the shell owners of the porn videos was an "Alan Cooper", who is evidently a former acquaintance of one of the Prenda attorneys with no actual relationship to the business and who has in effect had his identity stolen as a figurehead for the lawsuits.
* Prenda manages to bring a case in the court of Judge Otis Wright. Prietz reaches out to Judge Wright, filing a document that more or less directly accuses Prenda of fraud. Prenda replies to the filing by addressing ancillary issues in it without rebutting the core allegation. Judge Wright notices, and brings down the righteous legal hammer of a vengeful god down on Prenda, ordering them to his courtroom next week in person to either cough up a real Alan Cooper and a very compelling explanation of what they're up to or potentially face immediate incarceration.
I'm leaving out all sorts of fun details here, which is all the more reason you should be reading Popehat. For starters, you really need to dig into Popehat to see how one of Prenda's outside counsels explained the business relationship between the porn-video shell companies and Prenda itself.
[PS]
A big problem with Popehat vis a vis HN is that the blog titles are never congenial to this site, and the ethos on HN is now "don't mess with the titles". So it never seems productive to submit their articles. That's a shame, because Popehat legal coverage is everything Torrentfreak's and Techdirt's isn't: thoughtful, careful, technical, accessible, well-written.