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posted by takyon on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the prenda-lawless dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Paul Hansmeier, one of the lead attorneys behind the controversial law firm Prenda, has pleaded guilty to mail, wire fraud, and money laundering. The Pirate Bay provided important evidence in the case, where Hansmeier and his colleague were found creating and uploading porn movies to file-sharing sites to extract settlements from alleged pirates.

Over the past several years, so-called copyright trolls have been accused of various dubious schemes and actions, with one group as the frontrunner. The now-defunct Prenda Law grabbed dozens of headlines, mostly surrounding negative court rulings over identity theft, misrepresentation and even deception.

Most controversial was the shocking revelation that Prenda uploaded their own torrents to The Pirate Bay, creating a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirated downloads. The accusation was first published here on TorrentFreak. While some disregarded it as a wild conspiracy theory, the US Department of Justice took it rather seriously. These and other allegations ultimately resulted in a criminal indictment, which was filed in 2016. The US Government accused two of the leading Prenda lawyers of various crimes, including money laundering, perjury, mail and wire fraud. This week one of the defendants, Paul Hansmeier, pleaded guilty to two of the counts.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/prenda-lawyer-pleads-guilty-in-pirate-bay-honeypot-case-180818/


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  • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:30AM (3 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:30AM (#726424) Journal

    While these sacks of excrement did finally more or less get what they deserved, extortion by bogus/questionable copyrights and patents remains alive and thriving as a business model :-(

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    В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:55AM (1 child)

    by sjames (2882) on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:55AM (#726431) Journal

    I'll bet nobody got their money back.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 26 2018, @05:04AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 26 2018, @05:04AM (#726448) Journal

      The court system is a black hole. Money passing through that black hole can only end up in the clutches of the black hole parasites - lawyers. You're more likely to get money back after you've thrown it through an open airplane door at 10,000 feet over the Bermuda triangle.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @03:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @03:59AM (#726800)

    Yet all the IP extremists would claim that anyone that criticizes IP is a criminal. Yet they are the ones committing crimes that are actually worthy of being considered crimes (infringement is not an act worthy of being considered a crime).