Popehat has had the best commentary on the Prenda debacle. They don't have this part yet, but stay tuned, they will and it will be hilarious. Well, as hilarious as a law blog can be.
He lives with his dad and it's his dad's name on the internet connection. The lawsuit named his father so he just paid out to avoid any problems for him. It was several thousand if I recall to make it go away and he hired a lawyer to navigate the process for him.
>“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
> —Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
...
> they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum ... just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow, starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.
Copyright law was originally created as a mechanism of censoring speech and (later) for the benefit of guilds...and eventually became a tool of corporations (see Mickey Mouse). It has never really been a matter of benefiting/compensating original artists or authors...that's just been the justification.
Popehat comment: "Based on my observations throughout this case, it couldn't happen to more deserving criminals."
Which I totally agree with. When this situation started unrolling it really offended my sense of justice. Here were criminals using the judicial system as the tool for their crimes. It really showed how the US judicial systems costs and processes have created a mechanism for abuse. I wish sometimes there were some criminal law around abuse of a public institution which would capture this sort of thing more quickly and effectively.
Has anyone started talking about what a sane process for handling online copyright infringement would look like, or are we just going to continue this trolls vs. pirates thing forever?
It will be hard for change to happen with the copyright trolls being entrenched/moneyed vs. the pirates grass roots/technical. Each will continue to go with their strengths, which mostly don't interact except in their attempts to work around the other.
It wouldn't look so different than the system we have now. The justice system assumes a lot of good faith by participants (not limited to copyright law). It's somewhat slow to react to bad actors because first assumption is that they aren't bad.
It feels like this whole saga is evidence that the system isn't as broken as we think it is. Remember, no set of rules we come up with can eliminate the possibility of fraud on either side of the debate.
From my following of the ADA abuse, which is fairly rampant and basically equivalent to these two, the only real solution is getting a lawyer designated as a vexatious litigant[0] which is a very high standard to reach. I'm not sure if every state even has such a designation.
> "We consider ourselves to be an advocacy association more than we consider ourselves a law firm," [Paul Hansmeier] said. "With the porn reputation, I wanted to shift my focus and focus on something more positive. We're really focused on doing it right so anyone who hears about us says, 'Yeah. This is the right way to go about it.'"
There's a pretty strong bias built into the system against designating any lawyer a vexatious litigant. Filing lawsuits is how a great many lawyers pay the bills, after all, and they don't want to be looking over their shoulder every time they file.
There was a woman in the SF bay area who was finally restricted from filing lawsuits, but look what she had to do before the courts took action:
>McColm, a law school graduate, has acted as her own attorney in filing dozens of lawsuits against public agencies, tenants, banks, neighbors, physicians, newspapers, lawyers and insurance firms.
>Litigating with McColm "is a time-consuming and incredibly expensive quagmire," the homeowners' brief said. "Discovery becomes hand-to-hand combat and litigation a war of attrition as McColm filed motion after motion without regard to the merits of any arguments or the veracity of the facts."
>Among McColm's lawsuits was one for injunctive relief from children next door playing basketball in their own back yard.
If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here.
No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it.
Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work.
I guess if you combine all of those together then you doing something wrong. But isn't it ironic that the GOV is allowed to run illegal sting operations even if they lose big time like in Fast and Furious and that's fine, but if few lawyers figure out the way to make extra money, then we need to indict them.
If anything -- were they actually a fish who happen to clean the ocean? I mean it comes to be as simple as this: do not download illegal porn. Period. I can bet after being charged by those lawyers many settled and never downloaded porn again.
Well, there's the whole issue of harm. If I upload porn to a place where I intend for people to download it, and they do, how does that harm me? (Especially if my stuff wasn't paying me anything for legal downloads.) If I am harmed, didn't I contribute to my own harm by uploading it there myself?
Then there's the issue of misrepresenting/lying to the court. The court doesn't like this kind of game (trying to entrap people into a situation where you can sue them), so they repeatedly lied to the court in order to make it look like "not this kind of game". The court really doesn't like being lied to.
You're not a horrible advocate. But the devil is still the devil.
What if I have genuine porn website (I don't) with self made movies and people go and purchase them online. If later on I find my sales went to $0 and everything can be find on torrents, then I might be afraid of suing copyrights thefts because maybe after Prenda case judge will see it as a blackmail!
I really hate throwing out analogies, but the closest I could think of is the "unlocked front door". If FTV, the producer of the video, shared themselves or allowed someone to share in their behalf a video that they produced in order to bait people to download that, then I would agree that they did nothing illegal. Leaving my door unlocked is not illegal.
But they went further, by allowing people to download the video they then exploited the legal system by not charging the people who walked through that front door looking for things to take with robbery, but merely blackmailed those people into paying them money to remain silent, or else they would "publicly" press charges. That is what they are being accused and apparently charged for.
Sure, don't download illegally shared porn, music, movies or tv shows. But if you do download that content illegally, you also have a right not not be blackmailed for the action. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Generally I agree with you but what's the definition of "blackmail" in terms of court of law?
Basically everyone that settled a case in or out of the court was blackmailed? Doubt that.
I think if someone is breaking the law and you tell them stop or I sue you, then its even offensive to call it a blackmail.
Again, I don't look at this case from right-or-wrong point of view, as it seems it is a scam what they did. I'm rather interested whether the lady of justice will be blindfolded and find no crime was committed, or judge will hate them because its related to pornography and blackmailing.
> I think if someone is breaking the law and you tell them stop or I sue you, then its even offensive to call it a blackmail.
They didn't tell them "stop or I'll sue you" - they said "Give me $3,000 or I'll sue you, and by the way, it'll likely cost you more than $3,000 to defend yourself."
> Generally I agree with you but what's the definition of "blackmail" in terms of court of law
The grandparent post used "blackmail" informally; they aren't charged with that, so it's definition in a court of law is tangential. They are charged with perjury, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to commit both perjury and subornation of perjury, and also charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
None of which would be an issue with fact-based copyright claims against people the person suing (and offering to settle) believed reasonably were (or even might be) guilty.
> I really hate throwing out analogies, but the closest I could think of is the "unlocked front door".
I think a basket of candy set out in front of your door halloween is a better analogy - you can't credibly call the police department with a report that children are trespassing on your property and stealing your candy.
Even that analogy doesn't really work though. This would be the equivalent to personally handing out your belongings, for free, at the market down the street where you know ill-gotten gains are often sold. Then you turn around and threaten to sue each and ever person you GAVE your stuff to for "stealing" it. Because some of the items you gave away would be embarrassing for the receiver to have broadcast (really, why is that 50-year-old single guy taking your little boys used underwear??) - some of them are willing to pay just to make you go away.
You can't STEAL something the rightful owner of a piece of property willfully and knowingly gives you for free.
What's the opposite of fencing? Giving away legal merchandise advertising that it's stolen goods?
I agree, analogies don't really work. The fact remains that the downloaders of the movies were receiving the content from a place (the pirate bay) that rarely distributed legal content (and then, it was just mirroring distribution of things like Gnu/Linux ISOs). There is still an argument that remains that the alleged infringers had intent to violate copyright law.
The other argument here is that the creators or producers of the content hired or otherwise partnered with a firm that, in order to drum up business(?) allegedly distributed that content through the pirate bay, and simply filed John Doe subpoenas against every IP that connected to them. The article links to the other ArsTechnica article that points to someone who wrote what is essentially a BitTorrent "shell" program that acts and masquerades as a genuine client, connecting to a swarm and announcing availability of a torrent without actually receiving or sending content data. This is how other firms traditionally find and discover alleged torrent leachers and seeders from what I've read. As a devil's advocate to this practice, it may be that Prenda simply didn't hire an IT consultant that knew what they were doing and in order to discover potential infringers of the content they leached the movie themselves. Over time became the primary source of the content via TPB as they had more incentive to keep seeding to catch more unsuspecting leechers while consumers of the content got bored with the same sex scenes and moved to different porn, dropping out of the swarm.
What I'm saying is that it may have started with just incompetence of their part, and once they were called out on their practices, they might have thought that they weren't doing anything wrong. However, as more information became available it became more clear that they were basically baiting and extorting, and they had to continue to lie about what they were doing or else their ruse would be up (and they could go to jail). I'm glad to see some initial closure on this story with them getting charged, but I'm doubtful that Prenda went into this in the very beginning with the idea of seeding content "illegally" in order to find infringers of whom they could send bills to remain quiet and not proceed directly into litigation.
Even if all those things together weren't wrong, all the perjury and subornation of perjury would still be criminal.
But I don't think you can make a good case that uploading content you own to a public BitTorrent tracker does not create an implied license to download them content from the tracker.
If you're going to play devil's advocate, you should read the indictment first and see what the devil is being accused of. Here are some damning allegations:
1. They lied to the courts to cover up the fact that they were, in fact, advocating for their own shell companies. Doing this is not a crime, lying about it is.
2. When the courts started limiting them to 1 defendant per lawsuit, they lied again and invented fake allegations of hacking. They had not been hacked, they just needed false pretenses to send more ISP subpoenas.
3. When judges started catching on to the above and asked them to explain themselves, they lied still more to cover up their previous lies.
4. One of them forged the signature of his housekeeper, setting the housekeeper up as the owner of a shell company.
5. They uploaded files to ThePirateBay themselves, then lied and said they didn't.
> If you're going to play devil's advocate, you should read the indictment first and see what the devil is being accused of.
If nothing else, to note that included on that list is perjury in the course of a bar association complaint against their own attorney. So, maybe, it's not a good idea to be the advocate for these devils...
I upvoted you because I think we need discussions like these! I just think you're not aware of the facts of the case. Meekro points out some of them, but it's worth reading the Popehat saga about it(I've been following it since its launch).
The kind of activity Prenda engaged in probably still happens quite often, and people are forced to settle and everyone moves on. What Prenda did(quite exceptionally) was their aggressiveness in pursuing their "victims", the complex shell company structure they set up, then subsequently lied about, their contempt for court proceedings, their perjuries in many cases, etc, etc...basically, they pushed the system to its brink with no consideration, and after 3-ish years, the system bounced back with all the built-up inertia and squished them.
To address your specific points:
- If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here. - yep
- No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it. - yep
- Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work. - yep. Except the only question is, are they "illegally" downloading your work if you put it up yourself for free download? This was one of the earliest things that courts grappled with vs Prenda, before the whole thing turned to crazyland.
Here's also a comment from one of the people that were following Prenda closely before Ken got involved, "Die Trolls Die":
> Going after porn pirates requires a real investigation which requires much time, effort, and money. One recent case in IN had a Prenda local attorney only doing 5 hours of work – only one hour for the investigation. These outfits were not designed to do this. IMO it is a business model more than any effort to protect the content owners. As none of these porn copyright infringement cases have gone to full trial – judged on the merits (since 2010), it speaks volumes. Dismissals and default judgements only. Saying that, copyright infringement does happen and the content owners do have a right to take action. I just happen to disagree on how they are doing it.
Thank you so much for your valuable post! I appreciate you didn't do what others did - downvote - but rather take your time to explain. I learnt alot from your message and link you provided.
> No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it.
The issue is that they didn't just upload their porn "to the cloud". They seeded their porn via bittorrent, which is a tool used specifically to share files to others. Seeding your own work via bit torrent is at the very least giving implied consent to others to download said work. If you give consent to others to download your work, you can hardly sue them later and claim the downloading was unauthorized.
You were close in your conclusion that someone else could do the same thing by properly disclosing their role in the distribution. You just didn't read the case that the only problem was the lying under oath.
The consequences are that the defense will see through it very fast and won't settle so quickly, making the whole business model fail by a war of attrition.
>>[1]John Steele gleefully threatened opponents and Paul Hansmeier famously sneered at the defamation defendants "welcome to the big leagues." It was those actions that drew much more attention to their cases. Character is destiny. Not only are Steele and Hansmeier wanton crooks, they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall.<<
But the part that I really find interesting is this:
>>Character is destiny. ....they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall
I say bullshit. Just look at Trump. The guy has fucked over so many people and sexually assaulted many woman by his own words and we still elected him.
It let to their downfall because they were not powerful enough.
You are right that not everyone gets their "comeuppance". Maybe a better way of saying this is "society has an immune system to deal with habitual bad actors, and in this case that immune system worked".
@user837387 --- you're clearly a cuck who drinks the MSM koolaid. If a subcontractor doesn't do good work, he doesn't get paid and he has a right to sue.
While I accept the thesis that being what some random author estimates to be a bad person is not really tightly linked to either long-term success or failure, I'd advise against using such divisive, sensitive topics as contemporary presidential politics to illustrate your point. It's just baiting that is going to make the conversation devolve quickly.
Suffice it to say, enough Americans reject that narrative about Trump for him to have won the election. There are much better examples out there.
They made several million dollars seeking settlements generally in the single-digit thousands, so it obviously took them on the order of a thousand opponents till they hit a good enough one.
It's kind of the same dynamic as a bubble. Screw over people, get money, get intimidation power, leverage that to more power and more personal cachet. If you keep the process going, you can get to a position of president of the largest nation state in the world. If you falter, your enemies will pounce on you.
A lot has to do with luck, with how easily cowed your enemies are, etc.
The Prenda principals has a lot of success before their fall, too, due to an insufficient numbers of people in the right positions penetrating their layers of protective B.S.
Why make it political? Is Trump just living rent-free in your head like he is with so many journalists?
Also, re: "sexually assaulted many women by his own words." I assume you're referring to comments about grabbing women by the pussy, just kissing them without waiting, etc. Whenever people try to turn those unfortunate comments into an admission, they conveniently forget what seems to me to be the most important part: "And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
I was in long relationships and didn't date much. I Googled whether women wanted to be asked to be kissed. Google it yourself to see what I found.
By the way Trump has been married three times, with these lengths:
- Ivana Zelníčková (m. 1977–92)
- Marla Maples (m. 1993–99)
- Melania Knauss (m. 2005)
seems better than most people's marriages. I don't know how I read "rape culture" and "silence denotes consent" but under the rules that women state they want, men are in a difficult position. For example, women will prefer that they try for a kiss and to reject them. Does that mean a woman always has to be on guard and ready to reject anyone, in any context, all the time?
As a man I don't have to constantly be on guard that some girl will grab my junk or try to kiss me, at any moment, in any context, and be ready to formulate a quick yet diplomatic rejection on a moment's notice, perhaps after being techhnically sexually assaulted (in that I didn't want the unwanted touching). Whereas it seems to me that what women state they want is that situation. Or they've internalized it and normalized it.
I personally don't like hookup culture and dating culture whatsoever, and think serious relationships are a lot saner and easier. But I have to play by the rules other people set up. Which are stupid.
The percentage of women voting for Trump is not low.[1]
"According to exit polls, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump".
To take an example that women do not state they want, they (obviously) do not want to be roofied or date raped (and men don't want to do it either -- I have no idea who possibly could be doing all that roofying, I can't imagine that I've ever talked to any man anywhere who would do it. It goes sooooo far beyond what is normal.) But could you imagine Bill Cosby (who has been accused of literally date-raping or roofying multiple women) would run for any office and be voted for, by anyone?
So that 53% of women is very strong. (Especially given that Trump had no political background, and was a republican; both of which speak against many people voting for him, on those grounds alone.)
One thing that I will say is, that after Googling how women like to be approached, kissed, etc, and ignoring anything not literally written by a woman, I would say there is a strong culture, as expressed by women, encouraging the behavior Trump self-reported.
As a man it's not my place to tell women what they should report wanting; that's feminists' job. At the moment they're not doing well at it. As suggested at the top, please Google whether women (in their own words) want to be asked to be kissed, and compare it with the behavior Trump self-reports. Compare this also with the women who have spoken out against his behavior.
We're splitting hairs a little bit here, but from the perspective of a man putting the moves on a woman... how does "letting" look different from "wanting"?
When you can't see the difference it says more about you than it does about the other person. His statement isn't about consent, it's about an abuse of power.
I really do not want to waste my time debating this with people like you who are willfully blind but what you are saying needs a counterpoint. More than 10 woman came forward claiming it was not consensual and the number is probably bigger than that. It doesn't surprise me to read your excuses. It is probably the same thing that everybody that voted for Trump tells themselves. It's one thing to go for a kiss and get rejected, it's a completely different thing to go directly for the breasts and pussy [1]. But you already knew that.
Ah, now that's a separate question. Your original assertion was that he "sexually assaulted many woman by his own words." Have you conceded now that that isn't true?
Well... I just reread Roger Zelazny's Amber series, and recent political events did lend a certain surreality to the Amberites' magical fast travel system (named after certain playing cards).
Incumbents almost always win their elections. Who knows where we'll be in 4 years, but in general, an assumption that a new President-elect will serve two terms is reasonably safe.
Ok, so I'd never actually tallied the numbers. This does indeed indicate that Trump has a roughly 6/10 prior chance of winning reelection.
Mind, I think that prior is moved by the fact that he's a historically unpopular president-elect already, but we will indeed see over four years what he manages to make of himself. Or whether he manages to collapse capitalism once and for all.
You have to consider the circumstances around the incumbents that failed to be re-elected. Ford lost the election because of his association with Watergate and particularly his decision to pardon Nixon. Carter lost primarily due to the failure of Operation Eagle Claw. George H.W. Bush lost because Perot came in and split the conservative vote.
Stretching back further in the 20th century, Hoover lost due to the depression and LBJ declined to run for a second term because the Vietnam War was so unpopular they knew he wouldn't have a chance.
None of those are conventional political circumstances. So while you're right that it's about 3/4 incumbent races won, it seems that if there isn't a massive ongoing crisis, scandal, or political anomaly, the incumbent's chances are very good.
"In reality," says mathematician John Allen Paulos, "the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences."
For a job like president, the circumstances are almost always ongoing a crisis or political anomaly. I imagine re-elected incumbents also had to face exceptional political circumstances, just were able to navigate through them with luck and skill.
...and really, in general this is just so much post-facto justification. Whatever the election result, Reasons will always be found in hindsight. If Clinton had lost in '96, you'd be able to say it was due to the Whitewater affair. If GWB had lost in '04, you'd be able to blame the unpopular wars in the middle east (or more specifically, Abu Graib). If Obama had lost in '12, it would be easy to pin it on Obamacare.
We have to ask that you please do not introduce political (or otherwise) controversy into unrelated threads like this. It so predictably trashes the discussion that it's indistinguishable from outright trolling.
If a woman lets a man kiss her and gives no sign that his advances are unwanted, I have zero patience with later (usually much later) claims about sexual assault.
How much "patience" do you have with people who are mugged, freeze and don't say anything about it to the police?
Did the mugging not happen?
It's not the victims obligation to, after they have been assaulted, do anything in particular. Anything which will satisfy your "patience". They have been assaulted, and nothing the victim fails to do changes that fact.
If you have to compare an apparently-consensual sexual encounter to an obviously-nonconsensual mugging, you should think of a different way of making your point.
You're begging the question by assuming it was consensual. You have no evidence whatsoever of that, while there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. all the people who said it wasnt
Whoa. There's no reading by which this comment is civil, which means you can't post like this here. Please don't do it again, and please don't engage in flamewars about sexual assault, of all things, on HN. Or any other flamewars.
92 comments
[ 0.90 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadhttps://popehat.com/?s=prenda
Ouch.
I mean, if these guys wrote me a letter saying "pay up, or we'll let everyone know you like pr0n!" - I would write back "Eh - they already know that."
...so there has to have been more to it?
I mean - provided one was honest to those in their lives about their pr0n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookseller_(short_story)
>“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
> —Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
...
> they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum ... just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow, starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.
[1] https://popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/PendaSanction...
> Our courts are halls of justice where fairness and the rule of law triumph
> — US Attorney Andrew Luger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
Which I totally agree with. When this situation started unrolling it really offended my sense of justice. Here were criminals using the judicial system as the tool for their crimes. It really showed how the US judicial systems costs and processes have created a mechanism for abuse. I wish sometimes there were some criminal law around abuse of a public institution which would capture this sort of thing more quickly and effectively.
Yes: reduce the term of copyright and expand fair use.
However, while Prenda used copyright infringement as a cudgel in these cases, there was no infringement in any of the suits that they brought.
I believe this way more likely than a complete change of U.S. copyright law.
From my following of the ADA abuse, which is fairly rampant and basically equivalent to these two, the only real solution is getting a lawyer designated as a vexatious litigant[0] which is a very high standard to reach. I'm not sure if every state even has such a designation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St...
Hilariously:
> "We consider ourselves to be an advocacy association more than we consider ourselves a law firm," [Paul Hansmeier] said. "With the porn reputation, I wanted to shift my focus and focus on something more positive. We're really focused on doing it right so anyone who hears about us says, 'Yeah. This is the right way to go about it.'"
There was a woman in the SF bay area who was finally restricted from filing lawsuits, but look what she had to do before the courts took action:
>McColm, a law school graduate, has acted as her own attorney in filing dozens of lawsuits against public agencies, tenants, banks, neighbors, physicians, newspapers, lawyers and insurance firms.
>Litigating with McColm "is a time-consuming and incredibly expensive quagmire," the homeowners' brief said. "Discovery becomes hand-to-hand combat and litigation a war of attrition as McColm filed motion after motion without regard to the merits of any arguments or the veracity of the facts."
>Among McColm's lawsuits was one for injunctive relief from children next door playing basketball in their own back yard.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-woman-vexatious-litig...
If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here.
No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it.
Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work.
I guess if you combine all of those together then you doing something wrong. But isn't it ironic that the GOV is allowed to run illegal sting operations even if they lose big time like in Fast and Furious and that's fine, but if few lawyers figure out the way to make extra money, then we need to indict them.
If anything -- were they actually a fish who happen to clean the ocean? I mean it comes to be as simple as this: do not download illegal porn. Period. I can bet after being charged by those lawyers many settled and never downloaded porn again.
There - finished playing devils advocate.
Then there's the issue of misrepresenting/lying to the court. The court doesn't like this kind of game (trying to entrap people into a situation where you can sue them), so they repeatedly lied to the court in order to make it look like "not this kind of game". The court really doesn't like being lied to.
You're not a horrible advocate. But the devil is still the devil.
What if I have genuine porn website (I don't) with self made movies and people go and purchase them online. If later on I find my sales went to $0 and everything can be find on torrents, then I might be afraid of suing copyrights thefts because maybe after Prenda case judge will see it as a blackmail!
But they went further, by allowing people to download the video they then exploited the legal system by not charging the people who walked through that front door looking for things to take with robbery, but merely blackmailed those people into paying them money to remain silent, or else they would "publicly" press charges. That is what they are being accused and apparently charged for.
Sure, don't download illegally shared porn, music, movies or tv shows. But if you do download that content illegally, you also have a right not not be blackmailed for the action. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Basically everyone that settled a case in or out of the court was blackmailed? Doubt that.
I think if someone is breaking the law and you tell them stop or I sue you, then its even offensive to call it a blackmail.
Again, I don't look at this case from right-or-wrong point of view, as it seems it is a scam what they did. I'm rather interested whether the lady of justice will be blindfolded and find no crime was committed, or judge will hate them because its related to pornography and blackmailing.
They didn't tell them "stop or I'll sue you" - they said "Give me $3,000 or I'll sue you, and by the way, it'll likely cost you more than $3,000 to defend yourself."
The grandparent post used "blackmail" informally; they aren't charged with that, so it's definition in a court of law is tangential. They are charged with perjury, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to commit both perjury and subornation of perjury, and also charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
None of which would be an issue with fact-based copyright claims against people the person suing (and offering to settle) believed reasonably were (or even might be) guilty.
I think a basket of candy set out in front of your door halloween is a better analogy - you can't credibly call the police department with a report that children are trespassing on your property and stealing your candy.
You can't STEAL something the rightful owner of a piece of property willfully and knowingly gives you for free.
I agree, analogies don't really work. The fact remains that the downloaders of the movies were receiving the content from a place (the pirate bay) that rarely distributed legal content (and then, it was just mirroring distribution of things like Gnu/Linux ISOs). There is still an argument that remains that the alleged infringers had intent to violate copyright law.
The other argument here is that the creators or producers of the content hired or otherwise partnered with a firm that, in order to drum up business(?) allegedly distributed that content through the pirate bay, and simply filed John Doe subpoenas against every IP that connected to them. The article links to the other ArsTechnica article that points to someone who wrote what is essentially a BitTorrent "shell" program that acts and masquerades as a genuine client, connecting to a swarm and announcing availability of a torrent without actually receiving or sending content data. This is how other firms traditionally find and discover alleged torrent leachers and seeders from what I've read. As a devil's advocate to this practice, it may be that Prenda simply didn't hire an IT consultant that knew what they were doing and in order to discover potential infringers of the content they leached the movie themselves. Over time became the primary source of the content via TPB as they had more incentive to keep seeding to catch more unsuspecting leechers while consumers of the content got bored with the same sex scenes and moved to different porn, dropping out of the swarm.
What I'm saying is that it may have started with just incompetence of their part, and once they were called out on their practices, they might have thought that they weren't doing anything wrong. However, as more information became available it became more clear that they were basically baiting and extorting, and they had to continue to lie about what they were doing or else their ruse would be up (and they could go to jail). I'm glad to see some initial closure on this story with them getting charged, but I'm doubtful that Prenda went into this in the very beginning with the idea of seeding content "illegally" in order to find infringers of whom they could send bills to remain quiet and not proceed directly into litigation.
But I don't think you can make a good case that uploading content you own to a public BitTorrent tracker does not create an implied license to download them content from the tracker.
1. They lied to the courts to cover up the fact that they were, in fact, advocating for their own shell companies. Doing this is not a crime, lying about it is.
2. When the courts started limiting them to 1 defendant per lawsuit, they lied again and invented fake allegations of hacking. They had not been hacked, they just needed false pretenses to send more ISP subpoenas.
3. When judges started catching on to the above and asked them to explain themselves, they lied still more to cover up their previous lies.
4. One of them forged the signature of his housekeeper, setting the housekeeper up as the owner of a shell company.
5. They uploaded files to ThePirateBay themselves, then lied and said they didn't.
If nothing else, to note that included on that list is perjury in the course of a bar association complaint against their own attorney. So, maybe, it's not a good idea to be the advocate for these devils...
The kind of activity Prenda engaged in probably still happens quite often, and people are forced to settle and everyone moves on. What Prenda did(quite exceptionally) was their aggressiveness in pursuing their "victims", the complex shell company structure they set up, then subsequently lied about, their contempt for court proceedings, their perjuries in many cases, etc, etc...basically, they pushed the system to its brink with no consideration, and after 3-ish years, the system bounced back with all the built-up inertia and squished them.
To address your specific points:
- If they were creating "art" in form of porn they had copyright to said work. No law broken here. - yep
- No law broken if you upload your own work to the cloud. You have right to do it. - yep
- Finally, no law broken if you try to pursue those who illegally download your copyrighted work. - yep. Except the only question is, are they "illegally" downloading your work if you put it up yourself for free download? This was one of the earliest things that courts grappled with vs Prenda, before the whole thing turned to crazyland.
It's useful to check out the early posts on the subject, for example https://popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing-in-... Notice how even "early" in this case, things were already shifting away from your devil's advocate position and into allegations of fraud against Prenda and fights with the judges themselves(if you want to take a dive into the crazy, https://popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-law... is a good start..)
Here's also a comment from one of the people that were following Prenda closely before Ken got involved, "Die Trolls Die":
> Going after porn pirates requires a real investigation which requires much time, effort, and money. One recent case in IN had a Prenda local attorney only doing 5 hours of work – only one hour for the investigation. These outfits were not designed to do this. IMO it is a business model more than any effort to protect the content owners. As none of these porn copyright infringement cases have gone to full trial – judged on the merits (since 2010), it speaks volumes. Dismissals and default judgements only. Saying that, copyright infringement does happen and the content owners do have a right to take action. I just happen to disagree on how they are doing it.
The issue is that they didn't just upload their porn "to the cloud". They seeded their porn via bittorrent, which is a tool used specifically to share files to others. Seeding your own work via bit torrent is at the very least giving implied consent to others to download said work. If you give consent to others to download your work, you can hardly sue them later and claim the downloading was unauthorized.
The consequences are that the defense will see through it very fast and won't settle so quickly, making the whole business model fail by a war of attrition.
But the part that I really find interesting is this:
>>Character is destiny. ....they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall
I say bullshit. Just look at Trump. The guy has fucked over so many people and sexually assaulted many woman by his own words and we still elected him.
It let to their downfall because they were not powerful enough.
[1]https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal...
Suffice it to say, enough Americans reject that narrative about Trump for him to have won the election. There are much better examples out there.
A lot has to do with luck, with how easily cowed your enemies are, etc.
Also, re: "sexually assaulted many women by his own words." I assume you're referring to comments about grabbing women by the pussy, just kissing them without waiting, etc. Whenever people try to turn those unfortunate comments into an admission, they conveniently forget what seems to me to be the most important part: "And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
If they let you do it, it isn't assault.
By the way Trump has been married three times, with these lengths:
- Ivana Zelníčková (m. 1977–92)
- Marla Maples (m. 1993–99)
- Melania Knauss (m. 2005)
seems better than most people's marriages. I don't know how I read "rape culture" and "silence denotes consent" but under the rules that women state they want, men are in a difficult position. For example, women will prefer that they try for a kiss and to reject them. Does that mean a woman always has to be on guard and ready to reject anyone, in any context, all the time?
As a man I don't have to constantly be on guard that some girl will grab my junk or try to kiss me, at any moment, in any context, and be ready to formulate a quick yet diplomatic rejection on a moment's notice, perhaps after being techhnically sexually assaulted (in that I didn't want the unwanted touching). Whereas it seems to me that what women state they want is that situation. Or they've internalized it and normalized it.
I personally don't like hookup culture and dating culture whatsoever, and think serious relationships are a lot saner and easier. But I have to play by the rules other people set up. Which are stupid.
The percentage of women voting for Trump is not low.[1]
"According to exit polls, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump".
To take an example that women do not state they want, they (obviously) do not want to be roofied or date raped (and men don't want to do it either -- I have no idea who possibly could be doing all that roofying, I can't imagine that I've ever talked to any man anywhere who would do it. It goes sooooo far beyond what is normal.) But could you imagine Bill Cosby (who has been accused of literally date-raping or roofying multiple women) would run for any office and be voted for, by anyone?
So that 53% of women is very strong. (Especially given that Trump had no political background, and was a republican; both of which speak against many people voting for him, on those grounds alone.)
One thing that I will say is, that after Googling how women like to be approached, kissed, etc, and ignoring anything not literally written by a woman, I would say there is a strong culture, as expressed by women, encouraging the behavior Trump self-reported.
As a man it's not my place to tell women what they should report wanting; that's feminists' job. At the moment they're not doing well at it. As suggested at the top, please Google whether women (in their own words) want to be asked to be kissed, and compare it with the behavior Trump self-reports. Compare this also with the women who have spoken out against his behavior.
[1] http://www.popsugar.com/news/What-Percentage-White-Women-Vot...
As evidenced by all the women who said that.
What you won't go to the police about -- what you will let some one do -- is not the same as what you want them to do.
Yes, the context is one of bragging about power. But he literally said "they let you do it." In what way is that not a statement about consent?
This is perhaps the most horrifying thing I've read all day.
[1]http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/woman-says-she-was...
You've inspired me to write a Greasemonkey script to filter out any comment with the word "Trump" in it. Thanks.
So you'll be missing out on some things.
(They're good books. Read them.)
At that point we might as well just assume they abolish the two-term limit and crown him king.
I don't see Trump making it to a second term, especially with all the missteps he's taken so far, and he's not even President yet.
Mind, I think that prior is moved by the fact that he's a historically unpopular president-elect already, but we will indeed see over four years what he manages to make of himself. Or whether he manages to collapse capitalism once and for all.
Whatever.
Stretching back further in the 20th century, Hoover lost due to the depression and LBJ declined to run for a second term because the Vietnam War was so unpopular they knew he wouldn't have a chance.
None of those are conventional political circumstances. So while you're right that it's about 3/4 incumbent races won, it seems that if there isn't a massive ongoing crisis, scandal, or political anomaly, the incumbent's chances are very good.
For a job like president, the circumstances are almost always ongoing a crisis or political anomaly. I imagine re-elected incumbents also had to face exceptional political circumstances, just were able to navigate through them with luck and skill.
That's been debunked: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/
...and really, in general this is just so much post-facto justification. Whatever the election result, Reasons will always be found in hindsight. If Clinton had lost in '96, you'd be able to say it was due to the Whitewater affair. If GWB had lost in '04, you'd be able to blame the unpopular wars in the middle east (or more specifically, Abu Graib). If Obama had lost in '12, it would be easy to pin it on Obamacare.
Neither is Trump.
https://thepiratebay.org/user/sharkmp4/
Update: Camcast confirms account is owned by Steele.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/copyright-troll-honesypot.pn...
Did the mugging not happen?
It's not the victims obligation to, after they have been assaulted, do anything in particular. Anything which will satisfy your "patience". They have been assaulted, and nothing the victim fails to do changes that fact.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13197152 and marked it off-topic.