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from www.arstechnica.com – The four lawyers linked to the Prenda Law copyright-trolling organization were slapped with an $81,000 sanctions order, which as of today, they have missed the deadline to pay.
They did make time to file a last-minute motion to delay the sanctions, which only got referred back to the judge who’s angry at them in the first place: US District Judge Otis Wright.
Today Wright issued an order, predictably, denying the request by the Prenda crew for more time. The order [PDF] asks them to explain “why they have contravened the Court’s order to pay the attorney’s-fee award,” which, to be precise, is $81,319.72. It also orders them to pay $1,000 “per day, per person or entity, until this attorney’s-fee award is paid or a bond for the same amount is posted… Failure to comply will result in additional sanctions.”
The four Prenda-linked lawyers who are in trouble are John Steele [pictured] and Paul Hansmeier, as well as Paul Duffy (officially counsel for Prenda Law and other related law firms) and Brett Gibbs, a California lawyer who worked for Prenda but has since distanced himself from the group.
Also sanctioned are Prenda-linked shell companies Ingenuity 13 and AF Holdings, which, as John Steele explained in a recent interview, are officially owned by Mark Lutz, his former paralegal.
Prenda’s basic modus operandi has been to take “snapshots” of BitTorrent swarms, then file lawsuits against thousands of “John Doe” defendants based on their IP addresses. As discovery proceeds, Prenda issues threat letters to individual users saying they won’t be named in a porn-downloading lawsuit as long as they pay a few thousand dollars to settle the matter. Even as the sanctions move forward, Paul Duffy’s name has been showing up on new batches of threat letters regarding porn downloading.