Wed, Feb 17th 2021 1:28pm
Tim Cushing
The long saga of Paul Hansmeier one of the Prenda Law Firm partners who turned the already-shady business of copyright infringement lawsuits into a rolling debacle composed of fraud, extortion, and catastrophic failures has produced another coda.
Hansmeier got into the copyright enforcement business thinking it would produce a steady stream of easy cash. He and his associates went after people who allegedly downloaded porn, thinking that people would pay anything asked to avoid having their sexual predilections exposed to friends, family, and the public at large.
When that didn t work as well as Hansmeier had hoped, he went further. He and his associates produced their own porn (but didn t star in it, thankfully) and served it up to piracy services in order to produce a steady stream of defendants. (These home productions were never made available for legal viewing. They only existed as lawsuit bait.) It all ended in a criminal indictme