
Prenda Law copyright troll gets fourteen years in prison for pornography scam - tankenmate
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/14/prenda_law_copyright_troll_jailed/
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imglorp
Good news this guy is out of our hair now, but unfortunately the sentence
wasn't related to patent trolling and doesn't seem to have set any precedents
there. The business model was similar though: create a situation where it's
cheaper to pay up than to defend in court, collect, and then weasel around in
the court system to stay out of jail... for a while.

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edoo
Wow because on both sides if you had half a brain a) the lawyers wouldn't have
been caught and b) it would be effortless to defend against because there is
no proof it was you on your broadband IP unless you flat out admitted it
instead of just taking the 5th if it comes to it.

Lawyers could do this all day above board by identifying almost
abandonware/media already being shared and buying the rights legitimately and
going after sharers without secretly running the sharing themselves.

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CPLX
> it would be effortless to defend against

The premise here was that defending it was a loss for the people in question
as it was niche/embarrassing porn stuff. Lawsuits are a matter of public
record.

The goal was to make people settle quietly. It worked.

This scheme was an extortion strategy under cover of legal work. That’s
something the legal profession was extremely unhappy with and the reason they
came down so hard on these people.

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jaclaz
The approach seems a variation (in modern times) of the one in Roald Dahl's
story "The Bookseller":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookseller_(short_story)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookseller_\(short_story\))
which was very likely inspired by a 1935 story by James Gould Cozzens,
"Clerical Error".

Though the stories above made leverage on the desire by widows to protect the
memory of their recently departed husband, essentially it is the same.

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throwaway1906
I don't understand what they did wrong exactly. They had the legit rights over
the content and they offered actual pirates to settle instead of litigating,
to which they agreed. Where is the scam?

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pfdietz
Putting it up for download voids those rights (equitable estoppel, clean hands
doctrine). Concealing that they had done that was outright fraud on the court.
(EDIT: note that I am not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer if this would actually
materially affect you.)

