The verdict was a big win for the porn studio and its controversial law firm Prenda, since many other judges had previously rejected joining so many defendants in one lawsuit. The ruling would allow copyright holders to sue large groups of alleged pirates who may have never interacted, or even lived near the district they were being sued in.

The ISPs were not happy with Howell’s ruling and Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox filed an appeal. The providers hoped to reverse the earlier ruling and stop copyright trolls from targeting hundreds of defendants in a single lawsuit.

The ISPs were joined in their efforts by several citizen rights groups including EFF, American Civil Liberties Union and Public Knowledge, who all argued that the mass-lawsuits should be struck down.

Yesterday, nearly two years after the original ruling, Court of Appeals Judge David Tatel finally came to a decision. The verdict is a clear win for the providers and concludes that AF Holdings and Prenda’s mass-lawsuits are an abuse of the judicial process.

“Sometimes individuals seek to manipulate judicial procedures to serve their own improper ends. This case calls upon us to evaluate—and put a stop to—one litigant’s attempt to do just that,” the Judge begins.

One of the issues at stake was that of personal jurisdiction. According to Judge Tatel the evidence made it clear that the porn company had no real intention of pursuing cases again all these defendants, not least because many do not live in the District of Columbia.

“We think it quite obvious that AF Holdings could not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in this district,” Judge Tatel writes.

“In seeking such information, AF Holdings clearly abused the discovery process,” he adds.

The same reasoning also applies to the issue of venue, with the Judge noting that it’s improper to lump together hundreds of IP-addresses from people scattered all over the country.

Finally, Judge Tatel looked at the joinder issue. While he doesn’t define any clear rules, the verdict makes it clear that adding hundreds of BitTorrent users in one suit because they downloaded the same file is not sufficient. Especially when there’s no indication that they ever exchanged files with each other.

“AF Holdings has provided no reason to think that the Doe defendants it named in this lawsuit were ever participating in the same swarm at the same time. Instead, it has simply set forth snapshots of a precise moment in which each of these 1,058 Does allegedly shared the copyrighted work—snapshots that span a period of nearly five months.”

To illustrate the issue, Judge Tatel uses a blackjack analogy that was brought up by one of the citizens’ rights group counsels.

“To paraphrase an analogy offered by amicus counsel at oral argument, two BitTorrent users who download the same file months apart are like two individuals who play at the same blackjack table at different times. They may have won the same amount of money, employed the same strategy, and perhaps even played with the same dealer, but they have still engaged in entirely separate transactions.”

All in all the ruling makes it clear that the copyright troll tactic of suing hundreds of individuals without showing that they are connected and living in the district they are being sued in, is a no go. While it doesn’t sent any strict rules on when a case is appropriate, and when not, it can be seen as a “crushing blow” for copyright trolls.

Most importantly is that the Internet providers, and the various groups that joined the case, have prevented worse. If the previous ruling would have held up copyright trolling would have been made much easier and more lucrative than it is today.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Over the past year they’ve been hit for roughly $311,000 in damages and costs, while hitting a roadblock in developing new revenue.

Little over a month ago the ongoing saga received yet another twist when a significant blow was dealt to the embattled law firm by the mother-in-law of Prenda front-man John Steele.

After a month of deliberation the court has now handed down additional good news for five accused BitTorrent pirates. Yesterday’s ruling made it clear that there is no evidence that AF Holdings holds the copyrights to the titles they sued the individuals over.

“The copyright-assignment agreements [...] in each of these five cases are not what they purport to be. Alan Cooper denies signing either agreement and also denies giving anyone else the authority to sign them on his behalf. AF Holdings failed to produce any credible evidence that the assignments were authentic.”

As a result of this fraud, U.S. Magistrate Judge Franklin Noel ordered the company to repay the four defendants who already settled their cases, including their legal fees. In addition, the judge dismissed the suits against all five alleged file-sharers.

“The Court has been the victim of a fraud perpetrated by AF Holdings, LLC. The Court concludes that the appropriate remedy for this fraud is to require AF Holdings to return all of the settlement money it received from all of the Defendants in these cases, and to pay all costs and fees incurred by the Defendants.”

The order further suggests that there may need to be more investigation into the Prenda law firm and its principles. As a result, the court ordered the following (among other things):

The Clerk of Court shall send a copy of this order to the following individuals and entities for the purpose of further investigation:

- The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota

- The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office

- The Minnesota Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board

- The Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois

With the above, the ruling echoes that of Judge Wright, bringing the firm to the attention of lawyer disciplinary boards and criminal investigators.

Of course, the total amount of damages so far doesn’t even come close to the alleged $1.9 million that Prenda took in settlements during 2012, but with the IRS, FBI and even state law enforcement investigating, asset forfeiture is always a possibility.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Most of the defendants are sued in bulk, with copyright holders joining hundreds or thousands of alleged copyright-infringing IP-addresses in a single complaint. The rightsholders then ask the court to grant a subpoena to identify the account holders behind the IPs, who are then approached with settlement requests of a few thousand dollars.

After an initial avalanche of mass piracy lawsuits in 2010 and 2011, federal courts in several districts ruled that these cases should be restricted to one defendant each. Last year several ISPs asked for a similar ruling in the District of Columbia, but without success.

Judge Beryl Howell ruled against the Internet providers and granted the adult movie company AF Holdings the right to obtain the personal details of more than 1000 Internet users suspected of downloading their works using BitTorrent.

The adult film studio and its controversial law firm Prenda celebrated the verdict as a huge win, since many other judges had previously rejected joining so many defendants in one lawsuit. Adding to the controversy, Judge Howell told the ISPs who joined the case that they were not doing enough to stop online piracy.

The ISPs were disappointed with the ruling and Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox filed an appeal hoping to reverse it. The case has been lingering for a few months but yesterday the ISPs filed their latest brief.

The providers argue that the request for customer information is not supported by good cause, as previous cases have shown that AF Holdings has no intention of actually serving the defendants. “In 118 multi-Doe actions filed by Plaintiff’s counsel during a two-year period, none has resulted in a defendant being named and served,” they write.

In addition, the ISPs note that the adult studio is only attempting to generate as many settlements as it can, at the lowest cost without knowing whether the defendant is actually the person who downloaded the copyrighted work.

“Plaintiff’s primary purpose in seeking the personal information for hundreds or thousands of Internet subscribers per lawsuit is to extract payments without conducting any investigation into whether the subscriber — rather than another person using the subscriber’s Internet connection — is indeed responsible for accessing Plaintiff’s film without paying for it.”

The ISPs continue by citing several similar cases in which judges ruled that joining so many defendants in one case is not allowed. If the current verdict is upheld, they fear that the District of Columbia will become a “unique venue” for copyright holders to “gain the Doe defendants’ personal information and coerce payment from them”

Finally, the ISPs mention the controversial nature of the law firm Prenda, who were recently punished in court for their mob-like tactics. Among other things they note that Prenda’s principals used The Pirate Bay as a honeypot, relied on fictitious persons as clients, and submitted fake documents in support of their lawsuits.

“In the wake of these revelations, virtually all of Prenda Law’s multi-Doe cases have been dismissed or transformed into investigations into misconduct by AF Holdings’ principals and counsel. Yet, incredibly, Plaintiff derides the ISPs for objecting ‘with an air of moral superiority’ to Plaintiff’s ongoing efforts to extract personal subscriber information from them,” the brief notes.

The ISPs tell the court that this “lack of candor” should be addressed, and they ask the judge to throw out the case, or reduce the number of defendants from 1,058 to just one.

It’s good to see that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox are attempting to protect their subscribers. Of course it’s in their own interests, but it also helps to minimize the profitability of these classic copyright troll lawsuits.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In Federal courtroom 9W, in downtown Minneapolis’s US courthouse, a somewhat bluster-filled hearing dealt more blows to Prenda law, and their clients AF holdings. Two bombshells stood out; That AF Holdings “CEO” Mark Lutz has gone missing, and that even members of Steele’s family are working against him.

While most of the hearing proceeded as a normal smear-fest for Steele and co, attempting to discredit caretaker-turned- ID theft victim Alan Cooper (a strategy that has largely failed in every other court it’s been attempted in) the revelations about who tipped Cooper off to his name being used really stunned some people, chief amongst them Steele himself.

Cooper was alerted by a text from a “Kim Eckenrud” (spelling unknown) who sent a copy of a document with Coopers signature on with the advice to get an attorney. Kim is John Steele’s mother in law. Steele later tried to dismiss this, saying she’s religious and a frequent poster on anti-troll sites, who disapproves of his porn work. Or it could also be the work of Anonymous Pirates on the Internet, resorting back to the claims of internet bullying that have been echoed in other Prenda/AF Holdings cases.

To underscore this, he had earlier recounted a tale where someone posted a picture of his house and child, with the message “Best caliber to kill Steele’s family? When and Where?“. That was also why he stopped practicing law, because of threats from pirate blogs, he claimed, choking up and having to stop for water. He did seem to be silent about the police’s reaction to it though.

It was not the only bombshell of the day however, as when it came time for AF Holdings CEO Mark Lutz to testify, he was nowhere to be found. It’s reminiscent of a month earlier, when he failed to show up after being order to appear in San Francisco, and no-one knew where he was. Then it turned out he was ‘detained’ at the airport for 16+ hours without being allowed to contact his attorney. This time though, no-one knows where he is. Steele went to pick him up (as they were on the same flight, and produced the boarding pass to the judge as proof) and he wasn’t at home.

While there were no rulings, as yet, it doesn’t look good for Prenda, and the associated principles. The hearing’s order stated that the burden on proof was on Steele&co to prove the documents legitimate, which they completely failed to do, providing zero evidence beyond character assassination via hearsay.Despite Steele then driving around Miami looking for him, he was still missing, and has now missed three different court-ordered appearances.

This has led some to speculate that he’s now not only been thrown under the bus, by his Prenda cohorts, but possibly under some concrete as well (although Steele did refrain for speculating that Anonymous Internet Pirates had kidnapped him)

Additionally, with Steele testifying on issues he’d previously “taken the Fifth” for in California, he may have doomed his appeal in that case, and possibly opened himself up for a contempt motion (by answering he may have nullified his 5th plea, turning it into refusal to answer a question)

All in all, not a good day for Steele and co, and certainly not a performance worthy of the ‘big leagues’.

Thanks to johnhenrylawyer and Nancy Sims for the courtroom reporting

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There’s more in this cracking filing (Number 61 on the docket) though, including some more fun over the Alan Cooper business. For those that don’t know, Alan Cooper is the name of one of the principles in the case who has signed a lot of the copyright paperwork. It’s ALSO the name of John Steele’s former caretaker, who has sued over having his identity stolen, to which Prenda counter-sued

In the exhibits filed there are some nice audio snippets featuring conversations with GoDaddy. Included in there are some people claiming to be John Steele, and in one (PDF with embedded audio), the same voice is calling himself Alan Cooper.

Is it any wonder that Alan Cooper sued for fraudulent use of his name?

There’s also audio of Steele trying to fix his site when a javascript redirect sent visitors along to the Pirate Bay, sounding rather worried and being admonished that he needed to keep his sites software (mainly wordpress) up to date.

This filing comes hard on the heels of a motion by Prenda’s Craigslist-advertising Georgia counsel, Jacques Nazaire, the day before. In Nazaire’s motion, also heavy with exhibits, he shows upset at the discovery undertaken by the defense (some of which we’ve just talked about) as well as the public comments on the case, including comments by the two other people appearing before the judge that day – Defense attorney Blair Chintella, and his expert witness Andrew Norton (Disclosure, Mr Norton is TorrentFreak’s researcher and community manager, better known as K`Tetch).

Mr Nazaire included posts describing the July 2nd hearing, where discovery was granted, by those two, plus comments on Techdirt, popehat, and fightcopyrighttrolls (although in those last three, the article itself was not included), all as part of a request to put the case under seal, meaning nothing further in the case would be public. His reason was as follows.

Additionally, the Plaintiff is respectfully requesting that any future filings in this case may be filed under seal. This case has generated much unneeded attention on the internet. Please see Exhibits N-S. While the writers listed in exhibits N-S have the right to post these articles, unfortunately, these articles and blogs have created an embarrassment, misleading characterizations and perhaps an unsafe environment for plaintiff’s counsel and third parties. As such, plaintiff is respectfully requesting that all future filings be permitted to be made under seal.

The embarrassment is mainly due to an earlier filing in the case, where Mr Nazaire suggested that the court ignore Judge Wright’s Star Trek order, because states have different laws, just like California allows Gay marriage, and Georgia doesn’t. In the same filing, he also alluded to the EFF being terrorists, and how Mr Chintella was a member, presumably to sway the 83yo judge who sat on the FISA court in the 1980s. It didn’t work.

Likewise the unsafe environment argument was reportedly shot down at the hearing, when Mr Nazaire was asked why some of the contact details on the original complaint were not his, but those of Brett Gibbs, at that time Prenda’s local counsel in California. This is a big no-no under Federal rules, and the threatening behaviour Mr Nazaire was worried about? A single mocking email, he admitted to the court; we at TorrentFreak get trolled more by Piracy fans…

He has since doubled-down on these arguments as well, filing this morning that any sort of discourse or discussion (as required by law for certain things) is impossible, because

The telephone and live conversations will more than likely be taped and played on the internet. The confidential matters discussed via email will more than likely be posted as a publicity campaign on the internet.

It’s a reiteration of a claim made by Nazaire to the judge in the hearing – that of the poor bullied lawyer – and was dismissed by the judge at the time. Unfortunately it’s a technique they are too well associated with, having basically bullied thousands of defendants into paying settlements, or else have their names ‘posted as a publicity campaign on the Internet’.

While the evidence in so far is convincing, it’s by no means conclusive. Discovery won’t end until September 5th, so there’s bound to be more revelations. However, few can probably be as disturbing as the thought of a lawyer having steelefamilylaw.com on one hand, and trannyboyswholovetheirtoys.com on the other. Meanwhile a crowdfunding effort is in progress for depositions to be made of Mark Lutz, and others, to really get to the bottom of things.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In June, Prenda and its boss John Steele were accused of running a “honeypot” based on an expert report authored by Delvan Neville, whose company specializes in monitoring BitTorrent users.

The report hinted that the law firm was seeding the very files they claimed to protect, and found that many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4′.

In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4′used to upload the torrent files. Since the site wipes all IP-addresses after 48 hours, The Pirate Bay team had to decrypt older backups to eventually offer the list below.

Sharkmp4 IP-addresses

While the public is already convinced that the honeypot is real, the Pirate Bay evidence has now become part of the AF Holdings v Patel case which could land the law firm in even more trouble.

After a judge approved discovery to both parties in the case, defense lawyer Blair Chintella sent out a series of subpoenas hoping to expose the copyright troll’s nefarious tactics.

One of the subpoenas covered the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 used by “Sharkmp4,” as can be seen at the bottom of the list of Pirate Bay IPs shown above.

After a few weeks Comcast returned the subscriber details that matched the IP-address at the time the files were uploaded. As can be seen from their response detailed below, this IP is indeed the Comcast account of Steele Hansmeier PLLC, which is directly connected to Prenda Law.

Comcast confirms

The revelations above are the first solid proof of copyright trolls operating a honeypot scheme on The Pirate Bay, or any other BitTorrent site for that matter.

The honeypot strategy is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit an important one. The defense team has filed more subpoenas which are expected to be returned later, in the hope of uncovering more dirt on Prenda and its associates.

The discovery process in the case is still ongoing and ends in September. After the dust has settled it will be up to the court to decide how to rule on this and other damning revelations.

The irony of the above is that Prenda is now being haunted by the IP-address subpoenas they first used to pressure accused file-sharers into paying thousands of dollars in settlement fees.

Perhaps that can be called justice?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The ongoing fall of Prenda Law is even more drawn out than that of it’s ancestor in the scheme, the now-defunct ACS:law. Andrew Crossley lost one case, and was quickly disbarred, ending the practice for now.

It doesn’t quite work that way for Prenda.

While there may be some comparison, there are also some notable differences between the two. ACS actually did partner with an outside content company, while Prenda appears to have the rights to the work itself, and was actively seeding it on the Pirate Bay.

Also, while ACS kept things going in a fairly straight line and mostly in the open, Prenda has a multitude of shell companies and cases spread across the entire US. Clearly Steele’s plan was to go big, and go bold.

Nevertheless, while it’s taken a while, things are starting to look bad for Prenda. We’ve mentioned already about how one California judge unloaded on them via a Star Trek laden order, which required Team Prenda to put up a bond of some $100,000.

Now over in Northern California another judge has followed suit, this time for $22,531.93.

In the case of Navasca, the judge has decided that Prenda’s case has no merit. Despite mud-slinging about evidence (notably ‘exhibit K’ that’s much talked about in the community), claims of inflationary billing and other complaints, Judge Edward Chen has denied most of Prenda’s objections and awarded Mr Navasca his attorney’s fees.

The case was, according to the court, ‘frivolous or objectively unreasonable’ in a number of ways. From the concerns over the signature on the copyright assignments (which may or may not have come from Prenda principle Steele’s ex housekeeper without his knowledge), the decision on who to name as the defendant rankled the court. There have also been concerns over the manner in which the case was litigated, with emergency motions made when not needed, claims of evidence spoliation (destruction) made with nothing to back them up, and motions to disrupt evidence-gathering discovery.

Finaly the court had significant concerns over the motivation behind the suit. In short, evidence provided by Mr Delvan Neville (the aforementioned Exhibit K), along with information provided by ThePirateBay via TorrentFreak, shows that the torrent uploader may be Prenda itself. This indicates that Prenda is not looking to protect the work, but to use the courts as the sole revenue source for the work. (As a side note, TorrentFreak’s research team has reviewed the raw evidence and the program and concurs with Mr Neville’s conclusions)

All in all, this has led Judge Chen to come down heavily on Team Prenda, and award almost all the fees requested by Mr Navasca’s attorneys, $19,420.38 and $3,111.55 in costs to Mr Navasca, for a total of $22,531.93.

Will Team Prenda appeal? It’s likely, if only to delay paying out. Yet it’s another nail in the coffin of this predatory business model, and for that we can all be grateful.

judge Chen’s costs order in Prenda-Navasca case

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A new filing submitted by defense lawyer Graham Syfert opens up a new can of worms, accusing the copyright trolls of seeding the very files they claim to protect.

In the filing Prenda and its boss John Steele are accused of running a “honeypot” based on an expert report authored by Delvan Neville, whose company specializes in monitoring BitTorrent users.

Neville gave Prenda a taste of their own medicine by conducting a thorough analysis of the IP-addresses sharing the files the copyright trolls are suing for.

Many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4′. Could it be that this user is somehow linked to Prenda and distributing the files to increase their list of potential targets?

The expert report found that some interesting patterns emerge from the list of IP-addresses observed sharing these files. Several IP-addresses were present in the majority of the swarms, all using a rather rare version of the BitTorrent client Vuze which is often used for BitTorrent tracking.

The IP-addresses in question resolve to the VPN provider Mullvad, and Neville suggests in his report that these IPs were used by Prenda’s BitTorrent tracking company 6881 Forensics. The same addresses were also found commenting on Prenda topics published on the anti-copyright troll blogs FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie.

The report goes on to describe many connections between Sharkmp4, the tracking company, and Prenda. Among other things it ties the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 to John Steele’s GoDaddy account. The same IP-address is also associated with porn studio Ingenuity 13 whose work was shared by Sharkmp4 before it was commercially available.

Steele’s GoDaddy account

“It appears from all the evidence that John Steele (or someone under his control or with access to his GoDaddy account records with authorization to make changes to domain names) is the most probable candidate for the identity of Pirate Bay user sharkmp4. Sharkmp4 was the originator of the only found public releases of Ingenuity 13 works prior to the creation of naughty­hotties.com,” Neville writes.

“Some works were shared by sharkmp4 prior to the registered copyright date with indications of access to a higher resolution copy more related to the direct source,” he adds.

While the above makes it likely that Prenda were indeed sharing the files they were supposed to protect, there is one final piece of evidence to conclusively link “Sharkmp4″ to the copyright trolls.

It’s no secret that The Pirate Bay stores users’ IP-addresses, so after hearing about the new filing they handed TorrentFreak the log files for Sharkmp4. They link the user to John Steele and Prenda Law.

Below is an overview of some of the uploaded files which are all still online.

Sharkmp4 IP-addresses

The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files.

The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs.

The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable.

While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far.

It’s now up to the judge to decide what to do with it.

Update: The logs caused some confusion among TPB users but Pirate Bay’s Winston ensures TorrentFreak that IPs in the database are wiped after 48-hours.

“the IPs I dug up are from the daily database backups. I had to decrypt the backups one by one after checking the upload times and fetching the correct backup file for that day,” Winston tells us.

“The backups are stored on a separate cloud provider, pgp encrypted so the decryption key is not the same as the encryption key, and the decryption key is safely stored offline and is itself encrypted with a passphrase. So there’s no risk of users IPs getting compromised in a raid!”

“As for us sharing the IPs, we would obvious only do this to out the bad guys, after we linked them to the addresses.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When a federal judge’s contempt for a case is illustrated via a sanctions order littered with sci-fi references it doesn’t bode well for any attorney on the receiving end. Any judge that finds the time to do this is not doing it because he’s bored, but because he’s highly motivated to do so. The shenanigans of Prenda and its associates certainly rankled Judge Wright, and prompted him to make Steele and friends the subject of derision.

In the order, Judge Wright demolishes the claims of Brett Gibbs, by doing simple things like “looking them up on Google.” To demonstrate his point, the Judge includes a handy screen capture from Google Maps, pointing out that one of Gibbs’ statements was “a blatant lie.”

Towards the end, he starts laying down the damages, starting with attorney’s fees. Judge Wright assigned fees and costs totaling $40,659.86 to be paid to defense attorneys Morgan Pietz and Nicholas Ranallo. While that’s more than many expected, he then doubled the amount as a punitive measure, meaning a grand total of $81,319.72 will have to be paid by some combination of the plaintiffs (Steele, Duffy, Hansmeier, Gibbs, the shell companies and lawfirms) on or before May 20th.

And that’s not all. Judge Wright will also be referring the matter to the US Attorney for Central California requesting a RICO (racketeering) investigation, notifying all judges where plaintiffs have cases, and, as we noted a month ago, the IRS. Finally, there will also be disciplinary requests made to state and federal bars.

While some would have liked the order to have gone even further, its restraint will make it less likely to be overturned on appeal.

The next question is whether the Prenda ‘mob’ will pay up, or have another excuse to join the legion put forward so far. For that we’ll have to wait two weeks, if not more.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After the March 11 case, many were expecting a heavy-handed battle of wits between Judge Otis Wright II and John Steele and co in court today. Popcorn was popped, the legal bloggers were in court, and fingers eagerly danced on keyboards waiting for twitter updates.

Speculation was rife beforehand as to who would actually turn up and what would be said. Would the participants even injure themselves to avoid having to speak?

We didn’t have to wait long.

12 minutes was all it lasted. Just as people were settling down from the initial speculation, the word came out.

Understandably, Judge Write was not happy and adjourned the case. What little he was reported to say was fairly scathing to the Prenda mob, although we have no transcript to put it in context (yet).

What Judge Wright has in mind though, we can only speculate. Some believe a criminal case will be opened, based on the judges response of ‘taking Steele at his word’ when he plead the 5th. Others believe he’ll just hold them in contempt.

Of course, there’s a new player in this as well. Some reports have mentioned an IRS investigator, from the Money Laundering unit there. If so, that could be an even BIGGER world of hurt than anything Judge Wright could deal out.

All in all, not a good day for Team Prenda

This is a breaking story and will be updated as we get more info.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.