From Wikipedia: Prenda Law, also known as Steele | Hansmeier PLLP and Anti-Piracy Law Group, was a Chicago-based law firm that ostensibly operated by undertaking litigation against copyright infringement, but was later characterized by the United States District Court for Central California in a May 2013 ruling as a "porno-trolling collective" whose business model "relies on deception", and which resembled most closely a conspiracy and racketeering enterprise,referring in the judgment to RICO, the United States Federal anti-racketeering law.
The first link in TFA is to popehat's prenda-law case which is 4 pages of the sordid history of these garbage people back to early March 2013: https://www.popehat.com/tag/prenda-law/
So nice to hear they are finally getting down to the time behind bars stage. I hope (although don't particularly expect) that this will have a chilling effect on other unscrupulous lawyers who shake down people using fraudulent constructs.
IIRC, a John Doe defendant got a young aggressive lawyer hoping to make a name for himself to defend him pro bono. The lawyer started digging hard, refused to just accept a dismissal, and went on a counter-attack that eventually dug up enough for other parties to join in.
Huh. Phrased like that, it sounds like a John Grisham novel.
Which is a great story but it's a little terrifying if it's "System working as intended"
It seem to have only come this far because they doubled down on some already outlandishly scumbag behaviour. If they'd just stopped this might have all blown over for them.
It does kind of make you wonder how frequent tactics like "strawman defendant" or "made up hacking claims to get discovery" are used by other firms - because it sure seems like these guys got caught because they kept up these sorts of tactics relentlessly.
From that perspective, all the publicity surrounding this firm might actually make the problems associated with them worse. Other unscrupulous lawyers might study this and learn which specific mistakes not to make, rather than learning to avoid this model altogether.
Their primary error was arrogance, assuming that they were smarter than anyone challenging them even in the face of evidence to the contrary. I don't think there is a cure for that, short of US Marshals at your door with a warrant and handcuffs.
It's unlikely, but you could do it. After going through the trouble of bringing a suit -- once you have the judgment against them, you'd have to get in line behind the other creditors. :(
Unless they are in bankruptcy it's a free for all once judgement is granted. There is no line and can be collected on by any legal means. I used to work for a lawyer who primarily did collections of business accounts, some of which we personally garunteed, depending on the age/credit of the business.
Steele is compelled to make restitution to victims of the fraud scheme (even outside of the specific charged offenses, per the plea agreement.) I believe in order to get identified as a victim and have a claim for restitution considered, you would need to work with the Justice Department, probably specifically the U.S. Attorney's office that is prosecuting the case.
This is probably more cost effective than pursuing private litigation against Steele or any of the Prenda principales, because the U.S. government does most of the heavy lifting.
>Upon entry of judgment after his sentencing, John Steele will be a convicted felon with a federal fraud conviction. His career as a lawyer — or, more generally, as a gainfully employed person — is over.
While I share everyone's hatred of the tactics these people have employed over the years, I also hate that felons in the US are given such a hard time after they have served their sentences. People make mistakes and should be allowed to move on from them. A couple of years in federal prison shouldn't carry with it a lifetime of financial despair.
Whilst I agree with your criticism of the treatment of felons in the US in most jurisdictions a conviction for a crime of dishonesty, especially one in a professional context, will haunt you for life. In the context of this specific individual it would be a bold company that put him in a position to have any influence over money, management or clients.
It makes sense that it would. But should it also make it difficult for him to find housing, to benefit from aid programs like food stamps, or to flip burgers for minimum wage?
If John Steele can't get housing, can't get food, and can't get a job, but is also supposed to obey the law on penalty of more jail time or another felony on his record, what's he likely to do?
Point of clarification, a felony fraud conviction wouldn't prevent him from getting food stamps or any other aid. There are 6 states that have restrictions on drug felons getting food stamps, perhaps that's where you're claim comes from?
I recognise that what I'm going to say next will be very unpopular on HN. Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent. Harsh punishments make other prospective law breakers think twice before harming innocent people. I can agree with the notion that petty criminals deserve second chances, but what this guy did isn't petty at all. If even one innocent person is spared the ordeal of victimization, then harsh punishments are well worth the costs.
> Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent.
That is an enormous claim and there are reams of research on this topic - your assertion is not supported. It doesn't even stand up to the most cursory scrutiny - if it were true, then societies and states with harsh punishment would have lower crime - and this is very, very, very obviously not the case.
tl;dr Social norms, accepted membership in 'legal' society and education are the best ways to deter crime, followed by certainty of punishment - not its severity. The reason people commit crimes is, in rough order, usually out of desperation, social norms that lead them to believe the prohibited act should be acceptable or ignorance of the knowledge that the prohibited act is illegal, for greed, and, lastly, then for the sheer thrill of it. Severity of punishment doesn't act as a good deterrent for any of those categories - certainty of punishment acts as a deterrent for the latter two, but for the first two, desperation and ignorance, are fairly well inoculated against rational counsel.
Before you start arguing the philosophy regarding merits of punishment v. deterrence, I am going to put it bluntly: the claim at issue - that severity of punishment is a deterrent for crime - is an evidentiary claim and it cannot be proven from first principle. It must be supported evidence, and as far as I can tell, the numbers are in, and they do not appear to be on your side. Unless you have studies that support your conclusion, the philosophy is totally irrelevant.
You've clearly spent some time looking up links to support your cause, so it's unfortunate that you've cherry picked only the ones that support your beliefs. Here are some others that say the opposite.
Note also that 2 of the 4 links you provided are comparing certainty-of-punishment vs harshness-of-punishment. This is a false dichotomy. There's no reason you can't have both. Having harsh punishment doesn't reduce the certainty of punishment in any way.
Is there a lot of contentious debate on this topic, and a lack of consensus on this topic? Of course. But given the lack of clear answers, I'd much rather err on the side of preventing victimization.
> But given the lack of clear answers, I'd much rather err on the side of preventing victimization.
In America, we have historically low crime rates and historically low violent crime rates. Simultaneously, we have an insane crisis of prison overpopulation that leads into multi-generational cycles of poverty.
I too would rather err on the side of preventing victimization.
Right now, from where I sit, over-criminalization is a bigger problem than violent crime.
Our overcrowded prisons and high prisoner-per-capita rate stands as one piece of evidence against that. We keep throwing people in jail for long periods of time, but people keep committing crimes and former criminals keep committing crimes again at a higher rate than other countries whose criminal justice programs focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment. In fact, the ability for ex-convicts to get jobs after they're released is associated with lower rates of recidivism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Employment_and_reci...)
You say that your comment will be very unpopular with HN, but it seems to me that it's actually very unpopular with facts and statistics.
People who commit crimes rarely believe they will be caught, and as a result weight that conditional probability differently than an ideal reasoner might expect them to. If you believe your chance of being caught is 0% then the punishment is not a deterrent. Alternatively, if you are desperate, even if that chance is not 0% and you know it, it might still be worth it (say you're desperate because you have a previous felony conviction and now can't support yourself).
Now, one of the hard things to measure, is whether the sentences does deter everybody who doesn't commit crimes. I assume that there are crimes you and I have had the opportunity to commit, but weighed the odds of being caught and decided that the outcomes from committing the crimes were not worth it. It's difficult to measure that, but it's also not very useful, because it is hard to say whether the deterrent came from the punishment, or from the fact that it was lawbreaking in the first place, or that the label of "felon" is risky enough given the known outcomes.
In the place I'd argue we want the most deterrence - violent crime - our harshest punishment seems to have no real deterrent value. (I would be interested to see a review of this using more modern statistical / ML techniques to examine the data, though).
Evidence please? All the research I have seen suggests harsh punishments do little to deter crime. See e.g. this National Institute of Justice page as a jumping-off point:
https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
Most criminals don't do calculated risks and inability to integrate back to society (e.g. find job) makes one more likely to commit crime again. USA does not have lower criminality rates then other western countries.
Do harsh punishments do anything other than slightly affect the expected value calculation for a sociopath? For the majority of people, the reason they don't commit arbitrary crimes is a feeling that it would be wrong. I don't kill people because I might get 25 to life. I don't kill people because killing is wrong.
When I look at crimes of passion or necessity, these cannot be stopped by harsh penalties. A fit of jealous rage doesn't consider the prison term. Hunger won't stop theft. The only place harsh punishments could stand to be effective are crimes which have no moral component. For such crimes ALL persons make an expected value calculation, like a sociopath makes for crimes than an ordinary person would consider immoral.
Not really, especially when they're not applied consistently. "Harsh punishments" are disproportionately applied to the poor, which in turn increases recidivism when they feel they have no other option.
There's too many qualified people and not enough jobs to go around. Under those conditions, which person without a felony would you like to volunteer to take his place and no longer be gainfully employed? There's already plenty in that situation, perhaps this felony conviction means a non-felon can now become gainfully employed, which is good news.
Its great news for those who have not served time but have become homeless due to a complete inability to become employed.
No matter how thin you slice the piece of cheese there's always going to be a top half and a bottom half and agonizing over the suffering result of intentional misbehavior, ignores the larger pool of suffering experienced by those who never did anything wrong, other than maybe not be born in the right place, or to the right parents, or the right skin color, or the right gender, etc.
I'm not going to wring my hands at the injustice committed against a felon because some law school grad who never committed a felony can now get a law job, solely because a felon can't.
I find it hilarious social commentary that the average HN commenter commiserates with felons but not with the lower 99% of the working population.
Before you laugh yourself silly at the hilarity, you may give some thought to the various paths to being labeled a felon. Put the Prenda sociopaths aside, and look at the treatment of members of that 99% on the school->prison pipeline, as just one example.
You might just find that the injustices you do recognize are linked to the ones you laugh at.
One injustice is infinite when held in isolation, but a collection of injustices is a social hierarchy.
In the vast pile of injustice that is our culture, where felons fall into the hierarchy is unfortunate in isolation, yet simultaneously is also an infinitesimal fraction of the sum of injustice.
Being lawyers they have enough common sense to do the math and figure out that the cost of being caught would never outweigh the profits. At that point the only incentive is to make as much money as possible for as long as you can.
I don't know about that - is ~10 years in federal prison worth a few million dollars (after splitting it between Hansmeier and other co-conspirators)? Also, they're not going to get to keep the money.
As lawyers, I'm betting they could make the same amount of money in the same timeframe practicing legitimately (or, knowing how these idiots operate, "semi-legitimately"), but without the federal prison time.
Nobody ever thinks they will get caught. "I'm too clever for that" is basic human reasoning. Some are, some aren't. The real question is, are you willing to risk it?
I've seen a couple crackpot lawyers who think they can get out of anything because, after all, they're a lawyer. (Note that 99% of lawyers refuse to represent themselves.)
The lawyers refusing to represent themselves makes a lot of sense. With another lawyer you've got the potential to argue on appeal about your counsel, and they are also potentially freer to move and communicate than a hypothetical lawyer charged with a crime. Plus there's the network affect from your lawyer's additional experience and contacts throughout the system.
There's a lot of US district courts and judges. If a particular judge starts to ask pointed questions, just switch to another. Thats how they kept under the radar for so long.
There's something that I don't understand in this case(I'm not American): to my knowledge in the US the Police can trap you by proposing to sell you drugs or bomb making ingredients and then arrest you.
The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ? Don't get me wrong I think they deserve to go behind bars, but I would have thought what they did was legal in the US.
If a private citizen tries to sell drugs or bomb ingredients, then extorts the buyer by threatening to tell the police, I think that would probably be illegal as well.
A lot of the trouble here is how they went about this scheme, not merely the basic idea of what they did. They repeatedly lied to defendants and courts about their operations. Some of the materials they sued over were things they didn't actually have copyright for, but they used false documents to claim that they did. Those false documents involved forged signatures and even invented a person who didn't exist. They even filed defamation lawsuits against a person whose signatures they forged, for daring to say that they hadn't signed this stuff.
> The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ?
There are a lot of reasons, the most critical one being that it involved multiple levels of misrepresentations to the involved courts, which is not part of a normal law enforcement sting operation.
(There's also a difference between a criminal sting operation where the prohibited offense is, e.g., buying the goods being offered vs. a civil copyright "sting operation" where the prohibited offense is "copying some work without the consent of the copyright owner", and the active assistance of the copyright owner is involved in the act of copying.)
I'm not American either, but if i recall correctly, it's different when dealing with copyright because when you share your work (they publish themselves on torrents) there's an expectation that the work comes with a license
My understanding of court procedure is limited, but it is pretty clear that the appellants are making some pretty incredible decisions that surprise the judges, including insisting that the proceedings are a criminal case with the possible outcome that the appellants would face life imprisonment for criminal contempt (17:11 - 17:45). I gather this is high comedy for lawyers.
Judge Pregerson to the appellate lawyer, Daniel J. Voelker made me laugh (30:25):
"They abused our court system for illegal purposes, to extort money. [...] This has got to be written about for years and years - you're probably going to be part of the story."
Compared to Voelker, Morgan E. Pietz (beginning 35:30) for the appellee does a superb job of keeping discussions on point when faced with similar anecdotes and trivia questions.
Having (unintentionally) watched the whole video I was curious what the decision was, whether Prenda had their day in (criminal contempt) court, but as it transpires the appeal was dismissed: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/13-...
Curiously, as good a job as Pietz may have done making his case, it doesn't appear that when reaching their conclusion, the panel depended on much (if any) of the case law he cited.
They are listed from left to right on the video as Pregerson, Tallman, and Nguyen, IIRC, but at one point the judge on the left speaks of the middle judge as Pregerson. I think Tallman is the one on the left.
So is he the one on the FISA court, or is Tallman? I mean I'm impressed with the whole panel and it's a hilarious proceeding, but I'd be interested to see this point cleared up, and Wikipedia's list [0] doesn't mention either. (I don't really know where else to look.)
Tallman is on the appellate level of the FISA court [1], which is why his name doesn't appear on that Wikipedia page. Pregerson isn't on the FISA court at any level.
they are truly scummy esp with their ADA shakedowns.
ADA was a great way for people with disabilities to get equal access but now I fear its future due to the constant abuse by scumbags like Prenda and others.
It's actually a relatively straight-forward fix to kill the "drive by" ADA lawsuit industry simply by allowing written notice of a violation to business owners and giving them time to fix it prior to allowing suit to be filed. Activist groups could still get violations fixed, but lawyers using it as a vehicle for raking in attorneys fees would be SOL. In the meantime, there's some progress at the state level with the courts starting to hit back against lawyers committing the most egregious ethical violations.
That would fix a lot of it, but the root of the problem is that a lot of the laws are just broken. For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable.
The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor is a pretty serious defect.
> The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor
Literally the entire point of the ADA is to force businesses to make themselves accessible when they have no inherent profit incentive to do so.
> For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned
That's a misleading way of phrasing it.
As a public university, Berkley was never permitted to post unaccessible content online on the first place - that's a pretty unambiguous part of the ADA and is not anywhere close to new. The DOJ has been enforcing that for two decades.
Berkeley did so anyway, and then was told they would have to caption them in order to keep them online. At that point, they chose to take them down.
I consider myself to be pretty liberal on things like this, but denying access to all because it's not accessible to some seems way overkill. That's like saying a library can't have any books that aren't also printed in braille. It's an absolutely ridiculous concept and if that's actually a real component of the ADA I cannot believe public libraries haven't been sued out of business yet.
Although I tend to agree with you, there are some legal measures to increase accessibility. For example, transcribing a book you own into a Braille book is not a copyright violation.
> Literally the entire point of the ADA is to force businesses to make themselves accessible when they have no inherent profit incentive to do so.
There is a difference between an expense that doesn't recover its own cost and the thing shutting down your service because the cost exceeds your total profit.
> That's a misleading way of phrasing it.
It's literally what happened. Even if the consequence was that they never posted the videos to begin with, how is that better? It's the same outcome, the only difference is that we can specifically identify this case because it actually happened, as opposed to the untold other things we lost because they were deterred by the cost without people ever knowing that they would have existed.
> At that point, they chose to take them down.
And then everyone lost access to the videos -- including the hearing impaired, who might otherwise have built a support community to caption videos like these, or come together to pay someone to do it, or spurred faster development of automated captioning software etc.
> UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable.
That is super dumb.
Hopefully that specific problem (video captioning) will go away in the next year or two as automatic speech recognition becomes less expensive and more widely available. Basic captioning for compliance should be a single API call. Quality won't be perfect, but good enough for a deaf viewer to get the gist of it.
I don't disagree in general; it's far from uncommon for legislation to have unintended consequences the drafters didn't envision (fully or otherwise), to say nothing of accidental drafting errors. Technical corrections after a bill has been signed are hard enough to make, but correcting unintended consequences in the current partisan environment is even harder.[1] In many cases, those who were opposed to a given bill are more than willing to let those consequences stand for political reasons or are just unwilling to risk blowback from their base. Even when that's not the case, there's a common mindset that once a bill has been signed the issue is resolved. It can take a lot to get past that.
UC Berkeley's actions were definitely an unintended consequence. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it suggests the ADA is broken. Reading over the DOJ letter[0] to UC Berkeley, it seems like the decision was the result of a few years of laxity on the school's part despite the knowledge that the content had to be made accessible, as noted in school guidelines and policy quoted by the DOJ. Berkeley had the resources to help faculty with making their online content accessible, but it was up to the faculty members to avail themselves of it. Had the school done more to monitor compliance (and it would probably be a simple enough thing to automate) from the beginning, they'd have avoided the entire mess.
As it is, they have years of content and thousands of videos, PDFs/slideshows/supplementals, and more that needs to be sorted and reworked to meet WCAG standards. What might have been manageable as it was produced is now a massive project that would strain their resources to the breaking point. Deleting them absolutely sucks, but I can see the business logic behind the decision even if the idea of just deleting such a wealth of knowledge offends me on an intellectual level. Could they have found a way to orphan most of the content online, no longer under UC Berkeley's control? I don't know. That said, the situation seems to have been a rather unique largely the result of the school's approach to compliance monitoring.
Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA existed. These businesses may never have served a wheelchair-bound customer before, or if they did it was an ad hoc process. In other words, physically lifting a wheelchair over some stairs or just bringing the customer's purchases outside. That's fine for reasonable customers, but the wheelchair people involved in these lawsuits do not behave in reasonable fashion.
> Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA exited
That's not really true. Under the ADA, buildings built before 1992 are generally not required to perform renovations for compliance unless they are already performing renovations, at which point they are required to adherence to the requirements. And the amount that they are required to spend on compliance is a function of the amount that they are spending on the other renovations.
It's actually more complicated than that, because there are two sets of requirements (1993 and 2010), with different safe harbor provisions for each, and renovations to old buildings may or may not invalidate the 1993 safe harbor, but that's the general idea.
They also exploit extremely subtle parts of ADA like specific requirements for signage. Those things are very easily remedied without the need for a suit.
There are plenty of "reasonable gentlemen" running "family businesses" who'd be interested in your "if you've been breaking the law for 25 years you can keep doing it" plan.
The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requires that businesses take appropriate steps to make services available to those with disabilities. They can be sued by private citizens who attempt to utilize their services but are unable. So you get lawyers who partner up with someone with a disability and go around suing businesses because they had a wheelchair ramp but it was 1 inch more narrow than the local code calls for.
Anyone who has watched Law & Order knows making a deal first is best. I also bet once he is out of jail he will write a book and get hired on some TV channel as an expert and probably make more money than he did as a crook.
