
Copyright Trolls Order Wordpress To Hand Over Critics’ IP Addresses - fraqed
http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-trolls-order-wordpress-to-hand-over-critics-ip-addresses-130308/
======
acabal
Anonymity online, one of the most important problems of the coming decades.
Even if you don't think it's important to be anonymous to the eyes of the
government, being anonymous to the eyes of drive-by troll litigants is almost
undoubtedly a good thing. (And I think drive-by litigation powered by
increasingly easy access to information is only going to be getting worse.)

~~~
rayiner
Why is anonymity online so important?

We have never had the amount of anonymity we do today. Being able to
communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something
that was just not that practical before the internet. Society functioned just
fine then. So why is it so important now?

Not that I support what this troll is doing of course. But I fail to see why a
start of affairs that basically only existed for a small group of people from
1970-2000 is so crucial to civilization now that the internet is just an
extension of real life and not a playground for the technological elite.

~~~
drcube
Anonymity has always been easier than it is now. Before sophisticated record
keeping, you were anonymous to any stranger or new acquaintance. Moving to a
new town was an opportunity to become a new person. Anything you published
could be pseudonymous or anonymous. Letters and phone calls were essentially
anonymous, unless you specifically announced your identity.

With modern technology, all that is slipping away, or already gone.

~~~
wglb
I am wondering if you ever lived in a small town. There was no real anonymity.

~~~
bluntly_said
This misses his point entirely. Sure, everyone in a small town knows each
other, but it used to be that when you moved to a NEW small town (or anywhere
else for that matter), almost nothing followed you. You could re-invent
yourself, move past old failures. Now you have a constant and easily
accessible record of your life online, which anyone can look up. There is no
space you can go to that people can't easily find records of who you used to
be. THAT is a loss of anonymity.

~~~
wglb
I take your response as "no" to the question if you have lived in a small
town.

I grew up in a small town and my Dad knew everybody in the county and the next
one, whether they were in town or in the countryside. And likely a couple of
generations back. Several families moved to California, and the social network
reached there.

A cousin of mine had a brother that fled home. He eventually tracked him down
using old shoe leather techniques.

My experience and that of my family does not match this theory of "loss of
anonymity."

Now, modern suburbs are more likely to be anonymous, and perhaps that is where
this theory comes from, but it does not come from small towns.

~~~
ramblerman
Yes... your dad knowing people in the county next door is exactly the same as
having your online history available to everyone on the other side of the
globe.

------
eksith
Apparently, these folks (or is it 1 or 2 people?) have never heard of the
idiom, "when you find yourself in a hole..."

This is by far the most surreal, almost TwilightZone-like, behavior of any
legal entity I've ever seen. I'm tempted to almost take it as a desperate
attempt to self-destruct in some spectactular way as to deflect any sort of
punishment for the abuse of the justice system. But that would assume they
actually knew what they were doing.

They have no standing to demand this information as visitors haven't conducted
any sort of copyright infringement (we're not talking Viacom-YouTube stuff
here) and second, among the visitors were journalists and (surely)
representatives from the government. Someone had to research the trolls.

"The TL;DR is that there is going to be an unprecedented showdown in a Los
Angeles court on Monday that could lead to someone associated with Prenda
going to prison."

Uh, make that everyone, if there's any justice left. Except maybe that Cooper
fellow who had his identity usurped as CEO.

~~~
wiredfool
Popehat's comments on this are illuminating.

[http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-
facing-...](http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing-in-
los-angeles/)

Do not taunt super happy fun federal judge.

~~~
rozap
This was a great article, summed it all up really nicely.

Judge Wright's moves in this big game of chess are especially good. He really
wants to get to the truth.

------
tptacek
It's sad that Torrentfreak gets to own this issue on HN instead of Popehat, an
excellent blog run by former prosecutors turned First Amendment attorneys, and
if you have the slightest inclination towards legal nerdery you owe it to
yourself to read their (superior) coverage of the Prenda Law debacle.

Here's a starting point: [http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-
reveals-prenda-...](http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-
prenda-law-business-model-monetizing-squalid-douchebaggery/)

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.

~~~
Natsu
You beat me to linking to that. Ars has great coverage of this as well, as in
their most recent article on these clowns:

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...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/leading-porn-trolls-
mastermind-is-the-worlds-most-evasive-witness/)

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.

------
coditor
I don't believe a court has ordered this, it's just Prenda Law's threat. Thus
has zero meaning, other than more Prenda hilarity.

~~~
jstalin
Here's the actual subpoena:
[https://dietrolldie.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/automatticwo...](https://dietrolldie.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/automatticworpresssubpoena_prenda.pdf)

It looks like they domesticated it to California, so they (wordpress) would
need to file a motion to quash.

~~~
mpclark
I like what you did there - I clicked on the link to read the doc and then
slowly realised that my IP now falls within the scope of the requested
information.

~~~
Zuider
I found myself reluctant to open the links to FightCopyrightTrolls and
DieTrollsDie. Even if there is no consequence to following those links (and
smackfu has argued plausibly above that there could be) there is a chilling
effect from this demand.

~~~
Natsu
Worse, because they almost certainly will look for some way to sue readers of
those sites. On the other hand, it might give you not-so-free front row
tickets should they be sanctioned by the judge.

------
binarymax
I know its torrentfreak, so I should expect it, but there is way too much
hyperbole in this article.

Just give us the facts! </rant>

~~~
cstuder
Coming up with facts related to Prenda Law is not quite easy. Have a look at
the recent Ars Technica article which has a handy organisational chart of the
law firm: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/angry-judge-
calls...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/angry-judge-calls-porn-
trolls-bluff-orders-entire-firm-to-court/)

------
mkopinsky
_> Our client is requesting all Internet Protocol addresses (including the
date and time of that access in Universal Coordinated Time) that accessed the
blogs located at diretrolldie.com and fightcopyrighttrolls.com between January
1, 2011 through the present.

>Please provide this information in an Excel spreadsheet._

Easy. Give them an Excel 97-2003 spreadsheet with the first 65,535 and tell
them the format can't support any more.

~~~
pixl97
Just print them out on paper in an unordered format.

------
lutusp
> ... the sites mentioned above have been keeping up to date, _complimented_
> [sic] brilliantly by ...

* _sigh_ * ... the desired word is not "complimented", it's "complemented".

[http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/04/compliment-or-
com...](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/04/compliment-or-complement/)

~~~
derleth
Also, 'television' is not a word.

~~~
ZoFreX
What?

~~~
derleth
It's a barbarism, a mixing of Greek and Latin roots into the same word.
Barbarisms are errors in usage.

"'Television' is one of the most recent offspring of linguistic
miscegenation." -- Leslie A. White, _The Science of Culture_ , 1949

<http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/barbarismterm.htm>

~~~
ZoFreX
It's in the OED, that's good enough for me!

