Judge rejects motion to protect Prenda lawyer Hansmeier from further prosecution:
Paul Hansmeier, who is serving a 14-year prison sentence for filing sham copyright infringement lawsuits and extorting money from victims, has lost an attempt to enforce copyrights from prison. In a ruling Monday, a federal judge rejected Hansmeier's request to prevent the government from enforcing mail-wire fraud and money laundering laws against him. Hansmeier wanted an injunction so that he could file copyright lawsuits without facing new charges.
Hansmeier, who is also appealing his conviction despite having pleaded guilty, will be familiar to Ars readers as one of the principals behind the notorious "copyright troll" firm Prenda Law. He was sentenced in June 2019 "for an elaborate fraud scheme that involved uploading pornographic videos to file-sharing networks and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them," as our reporting at the time said. Prenda Law's strategy involved seeking settlements of a few thousand dollars from each victim.
[...] Last week, Hansmeier filed a motion in US District Court for the District of Minnesota saying he wants to "hire an undercover investigator to protect his copyrights against Internet piracy and bring claims under the Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against people who trespass on his computers to infringe his works."
[...] Hansmeier's now-rejected motion for an injunction said his proposed "litigation will be socially valuable. Internet piracy is a cancer eating away at the markets for creative expression." Hansmeier's motion claimed his new lawsuits would "avoid association with pornography" and enforce copyrights "in less socially stigmatizing material, like poetry."
Hansmeier also told the court he would "sue fewer people; instead of suing thousands of people at a time, he will bring more significant cases against a considerably smaller number of people." But his motion said he "is chilled from engaging in this petitioning activity by the credible threat of criminal prosecution" due to "Hansmeier's current imprisonment based on his participation in copyright enforcement activity similar to that which he wants to participate in now."
[...] Prenda Law was created by Hansmeier and Steele in 2011 to pursue the fraudulent lawsuits, the DOJ said. "Hansmeier acknowledged at his plea hearing that he and Steele exerted de facto control over Prenda Law throughout the scheme, but recruited a now-deceased Illinois attorney to pretend to own and control the law firm," the DOJ said.
Previously:
Porn Trolling Mastermind Paul Hansmeier Gets 14 Years in Prison
Prenda Lawyer Pleads Guilty in Pirate Bay Honeypot Case
[...]
[FYI: Prenda-related stories go all the way back to the beginning days of SN --hubie]
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Ars Technica brings us Prenda Law stunner: "Porn trolls" win a round, dodge sanctions.
US District Judge Joan Ericksen has overturned sanctions that were issued in November by a US Magistrate Judge in her district, Franklin Noel.
That order was stayed while Ericksen could consider Prenda's objections. Now she has considered their objections and found them convincing.
Who will stop this nagging troll from exposing your Porn habits to a court of law?
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/
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Porn trolling mastermind Paul Hansmeier gets 14 years in prison
A federal judge in Minneapolis has sentenced Paul Hansmeier to 14 years in prison for an elaborate fraud scheme that involved uploading pornographic videos to file-sharing networks and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them.
"It is almost incalculable how much your abuse of trust has harmed the administration of justice," said Judge Joan Ericksen at a Friday sentencing hearing.
We've been covering the antics of Hansmeier and his business partner John Steele for many years. Way back in 2012, we started reporting on a law firm called Prenda Law that was filing lawsuits against people for sharing pornographic films online. Prenda wasn't the only law firm filing these kinds of lawsuits, but Prenda came up with a novel way of ginning up more business: uploading the films itself, including some that were produced by Prenda associates.
A key part of the firm's strategy was to seek settlements of a few thousand dollars. The demanded sums were small enough that it cost less to settle the lawsuits than fight them. Prosecutors say that the men made more than $6 million from copyright settlements between 2010 and 2013.
Over time, judges became increasingly skeptical of Prenda's tactics. In one case, a judge threw out one Prenda-related lawsuit after it became clear that no one in the courtroom could explain exactly who the supposed plaintiff—an entity called Sunlust pictures—actually was. She described the lawsuit as an "attempted fraud on the Court."
As judges around the country dug into Prenda-related cases, they found more and more examples of apparent fraud. In another case, Steele and Hansmeier were accused of forging the name Alan Cooper, a man who served as a caretaker for one of Steele's properties. Cooper said he hadn't been consulted before being listed as the CEO of two Prenda-linked shell companies.
As the extent of the alleged fraud became apparent, judges began referring the pair to federal prosecutors. In 2016, the two men were arrested and charged with federal fraud, perjury, and money laundering.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Opportunist on Friday February 03, @07:49AM (1 child)
Where is all that prison brutality we get to hear so much about when it could be useful?
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Friday February 03, @05:28PM
Strangely enough, at a glance I read the link to the FA as:
"Judge rejects motion to protect Prenda lawyer Hansmeier from further prostitution."
No sympathy for this parasite.