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.

2013 isn’t turning into such a good year for prolific copyright trolls Prenda Law.

They’ve been slapped down by a Federal judge in south California, hit for costs in northern California, a Georgia Federal Judge has turned the tables and allowed discovery against them, and there’s mounting evidence that they’re behind the very infringements they’re suing about.

So how can Prenda’s summer get better? A state court in Minnesota could award $63,000 in attorney’s fees, that’s how; the kicker being that it’s awarded against Prenda and for those the company accused.

Not that this is Prenda Law, prolific copyright trolls we’re dealing with here. Oh no. This case involved Alpha Law Firm LLC, which just happens to have the same address, principles, and operating practices as Prenda, and even did a nice bit of content-sharing between websites. However, the assertion is that they’re completely NOT Prenda, at all, especially since Prenda just shut-up shop.

In this particular case – Guava LLC v Merkel – the subject isn’t actually copyright trolling, but that most dastardly of crimes, hacking. According to the complaint (PDF):

Defendant used hacked usernanes and passwords to gain access to Plaintiff’s protected computer systems and intentionally intercepted numerous electronic communications between Plaintiff and its paying members.

The intercepted electronic communications included information regarding the identities of Plaintiff’s customers, account information, financial information, computer programming and security information, and other information that Plaintiff protects and does not even give access to third parties, even those who pay for and obtain legitimate passwords to access Plaintiff’s websites.

Put more simply, “..this guy used someone else’s username and password, and by doing so accessed info that wasn’t available to anyone.” If that sounds confused and contradictory to anyone else, you’d be right, which is why the exhibits accompanying the complaint are random ‘hacking’ stories, with no real relevance to the case.

From there, the case gets stranger.

The defendant, Spencer Merkel, already had dealings with Prenda Law in another case based in DC. In that one he was accused of infringement of the film “Amateur Alure – Maelynn”, and agreed to settle after admitting he downloaded it from Cheggit.

Not having the amount of cash they wanted he asked if there were other ways to settle, and the suggestion was to become a complicit defendant to be dismissed at the end of the case leaving a lot of other co-defendants, found during this case, hanging.

As a side note, the settlement demand spends a significant portion talking about the sophisticated detection systems used, and refers to a 2009 paper published by the University of Colorado. However, we strongly doubt that Prenda, or its expert witness (now usually called 6881 forensics or LiveWire, run by the brother of Prenda lawyer Paul Hansmeier) is actually using the Bitstalker program, whose effectiveness we doubted when the paper first came out.

That led to this case, Guava LLC v Merkel, and its computer hacking claims. These claims were, it seems, to get around the problems of having already sued and settled the copyright case. Using state laws they could file in state courts, and keep a distance between this case and the Doe case filed in DC that Merkel settled.

Eventually the case was dismissed with prejudice back on March 1st, in part thanks to a statement by Merkel and in part thanks to a motion by a number of ISPs. However, the truth is that any case like this isn’t over until people have been paid, and so on Wednesday, District Court Judge Tanya Bransford awarded attorney’s fees to defense lawyers totalling $63,367.52

This order is made jointly and severally liable to Alpha Law Firm, Guava LLC and Guava’s counsel of record, Michael Dugas, and due within 30 days. This means it doesn’t matter which of the parties pays it, they’re all liable for the amount as a group. Meanwhile, Steele, Hansmeier, Prenda Law, and the Anti-Piracy Law group were not held liable for these costs, but since Alpha is part of that ‘group’ (and even shares their address) they were still effectively hit by it.

That leaves a choice for ‘Alpha Law Firm’. They can pay the amount (either in part or in full) or leave the local counsel Dugas to pay for it all. However, if they throw Dugas under the bus they may find it extremely difficult to recruit any more lawyers to act as local counsel for them, and could even start losing the local counsel they already have in cases around the country.

No matter which way you slice it though, it’s another win for the public, and another loss for the copyright trolls.

Hat-tip –  SJD @ FightcopyrightTrolls.com

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

A significant number of the defendants are likely to be guilty, but there’s also a lot of collateral damage. Firstly it’s unclear how accurate the evidence gathering techniques of the copyright holders are, and even when they have the correct IP-address it doesn’t necessarily follow that the account holder on file is actually the infringer.

In previous weeks we showed how copyright holders accused the dead, blind and also a 70-year-old grandma who claimed to have never heard about BitTorrent. Unlike many others, the latter had no intention of paying up. Instead the retired widow from San Francisco went to the press with her conclusion that the letter she received “smacks of extortion.”

Paying the copyright holder a settlement fee for sharing porn (Amateur Allure: Kim) was out of the question, and she was determined to fight the case in court.

Lawyer John Steele, whose law firm is representing the copyright holder in this case, read the press reports on this case with great interest and took a step we’ve never seen before. Apparently Steele and his team decided to review their evidence, only to come to the shocking realization that they sued the wrong person.

In a letter to the woman signed by Steele, the lawyer explains that they’ve made a mistake and that the case against her is being dropped immediately. The letter further notes that the actual person who did download and share the porn movie was found.

Although this is great news for grandma, something is really wrong with this story.

If Steele claims that something went wrong, and that the real person has now been caught, this means that they actually included the wrong IP-address in the original complaint. Since an IP-address is the only evidence the copyright holders have, they must have made an error that they were able to correct later.

If that is indeed the case, then we have to wonder how many times such mistakes have been made in the past. Mistakes that cost innocent people several thousand dollars.

The other possibility is that the ISP made an error when matching the supplied IP address to a name, but there is no mention that this is the case and the lady in question has received no apology from her service provider.

The remaining explanation for this turn of events is that Steele and his friends are diverting attention away from the truth in what has turned out to be a significantly embarrassing case brought against a rightfully defiant lady. That wouldn’t be unthinkable either as copyright holders and the lawyers that represent them generally know that suing the old, dead, blind and crippled is bad for PR.

In the past we documented how the UK anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law deliberately chose to drop such cases to avoid bad press.

“If you find someone who is blind, one legged and dying, and you think they are not worth pursuing due to the possibility of bad PR, please also put them in [the folder of people who not to pursue] there,” lawyer Andrew Crossley wrote in an email to his colleagues.

It wouldn’t surprise us if the case against the 70-year-old grandma was dropped for exactly the same reason. But either way, instead of covering the case by dropping it, Steele and partners only raised more suspicion with their failed attempt to rationalize their ‘mistake’.

Adding insult to injury, their failure to even give grandma the courtesy of an apology only serves to discredit them further.

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