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Appeals Judge Calls Prenda an "Ingenious Crooked Extortionate Operation"
ktetch-pirate ("pirate politician" Andrew Norton) writes with this news from his blog: [Monday] was the long-awaited appeals court hearing in the ongoing Prenda copyright troll saga. Almost exactly two years after Judge Otis Wright went sci-fi on Prenda and its principles, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held an appeals hearing requested by Prenda on the sanctions, and it was not a pretty day for Prenda. Highlights included Senior Judge Pregerson calling Prenda's operation an "Ingenious Crooked Extortionate Operation" after describing in detail how they operate.
Prenda also astonished the judges by welcoming the idea of a criminal contempt hearing, which Legal blog Popehat thinks is likely to happen, on top of the sanctions being sustained.
Prenda also astonished the judges by welcoming the idea of a criminal contempt hearing, which Legal blog Popehat thinks is likely to happen, on top of the sanctions being sustained.
Perhaps a lawyer needs to boldly go and inform this court that they now need to waste taxpayer money translating the sci-fi bullshit presented as a legal argument. You know, for the rest of the planet that doesn't know what a Tribble is.
To an average English speaker who has never heard of Star Trek, the text quoted is far more understandable than the average legal document. Who should pay for the usually required translation from legalese?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
It wouldn't matter what criminal charges I was facing, I would be boldly laughing in the face of this moron who feels the need to go all "sci-fi" while at work, as if the Star Trek embellishments somehow helped here.
Are you suggesting that a court which listened to Prenda's John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, operating under the name 'Lightspeed Media Corporation', argue that Court ordered sanctions don't apply to them because they don't feel like paying, is still somehow dignified and above making references to something as banal as Skiffy? That a defendant who is considered an embarrassment to the entire legal profession cannot ever be subjected to ridicule?
More to the point, did you know that Prendateer John Steel already tried calling a district judge a moron and laughing in his face in his own courtroom, with predictable results.
If anybody has offended the dignity of the courts and running up the bill for the State of California before running off without paying, it was John Steele, Paul Hansmeier and Mark Lutz.
Perhaps after you have spent six years in law school, nine years in the Marine Corps, served as a county sheriff for eleven years and then put in twenty-five years as a practising lawyer before being appointed to sit in county and state courts, you too will be able to write legal decisions any way you like. Until then, there's always complaining on the Internet.
Judges have wide lattitude in the text of their orders. As long as they cover the points of law backing their orders (otherwise it'd be appealed successfully) there's no other requirement on content. Being a judge is kinda boring, so sometimes they let off some steam by trying to distinguish the order in some way. Most don't make news, but this being a set of cases watched internationally, did.
Other examples include a judge ordering a game of rock-scissors-paper on both counsels to decide where a deposition hearing would take place, it did its job of chastising the lawyers. And as someone who reads WAY too many legal briefs, the star trek order here was a refreshing break, as well as limited to the plain-language sections, leaving the legalese alone, for you, the purist.
On behalf of the rest of the Slashdot readership, I humbly invite you to bite me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
but how exactly is this different than extorting payments for those?
From what I remember about what happened 2 years ago, their scheme went something like this:
1. Buy copyrights to porn movies using a company controlled by them (the attorneys) but nominally owned by a handyman/friend of one the attorneys, whose signature was forged on the company documents.
2. Release those movies on torrent sites.
3. Track who (which IP addresses) were downloading them.
4. Sue people on behalf of the holding company from step 1.
5. Gather spurious evidence but secure settlement payment on threat of taking the people to court and making a public assertion that they downloaded the porn movies.
One major problem with this scheme is that the lawyers doing the suing are also the people who stand to make monetary gain on the settlements, but this relationship was never disclosed or even really proven, despite a lot of circumstantial evidence. The lawyers took great pains to conceal the fact that they would personally receive the settlement money, that it was ultimately being paid to them and not some random holding company. The court wasn't able to prove that they were behind the holding company, and when pressed the lawyers could not adequately explain the relationships between the various lawyers, Prenda Law, the holding companies, the guy who owns the holding company on paper, etc. Put simply, it was a giant fraud scheme to release their own copyrighted movies on torrent sites and then sue people allegedly downloading them, while concealing the fact that the lawyers were being directly enriched by the settlement payments.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black