Ex-Prenda Lawyer Wonders If Team Prenda Believes Their Own Lies After Laughable Hearing

from the keep-trying dept

Earlier this week, there was yet another hearing dealing with one of the many courts investigating the actions of Team Prenda. This was in the Navasca case up in San Francisco, where some sanctions have already been issued, and more may await. Judge Edward Chen handed off this stage of the case to Magistrate Judge Nador Vadas, who recently demanded some actual answers, telling "AF Holdings" (one of the many Prenda shell corporations) to show up ready to answer some very specific questions. That's not quite what happened.

The day started off with a laughable declaration from John Steele, in which he stuck with his plan of deny absolutely everything. This focused on denying every bit of Delvan Neville's expert analysis showing a high likelihood that John Steele and Paul Hansmeier were themselves seeding the files they later sued over, via The Pirate Bay. Neville's analysis is detailed, thorough and hard to argue against. Steele and Hansmeier, along with Paul Duffy (the official "named" partner of Prenda) have been insisting that there is nothing to Neville's filing, and keep insisting that he's a nobody, rather than an expert.

I note initially that Mr. Neville is a graduate student; that he has not disclosed why he prepared his declaration.... whether he will successfully complete whatever course of study he is now engaged upon as a "graduate student;" whether he meets any of the rigorous standards applicable to an expert witness in a Federal court proceeding in a Federal court proceeding. (sic)

Upon my review of Mr. Neville's declaration, I find the claims contained therein pertaining to me to be completely untrue and without any basis in fact.

Mr. Neville asserts I may have acted to "seed" a BitTorrent "swarm" involved in the digital piracy of copyrighted works. Those assertions (perhaps better described as suspicions) are categorically false. I have never acted to "seed" a BitTorrent "swarm," and would not know how to do so if for some reason I would desire to try.

It goes on like that. Of course, this is all pretty laughable, given the mountains of evidence that connect Steele to the seeding, including Comcast revealing that the IP address associated with the seeding belonged to Steele Hansmeier, and the information provided by GoDaddy involving John Steele impersonating Alan Cooper and Mark Lutz. Those both came out in a different Prenda case, but showed up in this particular hearing.

Only Paul Duffy from Team Prenda showed up to the hearing (though he showed up late) and while it was promised that Mark Lutz was "in town" and would be there, he never showed up at all. The star of the show was former Prenda team player Brett Gibbs, who, after realizing that Hansmeier and Steele had thrown him under the bus, started finally revealing the truth. Hansmeier and Steele have continued to insist they had little oversight over Gibbs, but at the hearing he produced phone records showing somewhere around 4,500 minutes of phone calls with Hansmeier. He was later asked to identify the recordings on those calls, and said they were John Steele's voice -- which Duffy weakly objected to.

After Neville testified about the inner workings of BitTorrent, it was Duffy's turn, and many people expected a full cross-examination of Neville. Given that Duffy, Hansmeier and Steele have been insisting that Neville's claims are a complete joke and wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny, you'd think they'd relish a chance to have him on the stand. But they more or less ignored him. Instead, Duffy spent a ridiculous amount of time tying himself into knots with an astoundingly weak attempt to pin the blame on Gibbs himself, focusing mainly on procedural issues. The two points he seemed to focus on: that Gibbs never actually saw the infamous "Salt Marsh" signature and that Gibbs never officially checked to see if the Steele Hansmeier law firm was dissolved or purchased after Steele and Hansmeier told Gibbs they'd be doing business as Prenda going forward.

Neither point makes much sense, nor does it really matter. On the signature front, Gibbs has already stated, repeatedly, that he'd asked about Salt Marsh and Hansmeier insisted it was legit. If there was a procedural error, it was trusting his boss (and friend and former roommate). Either way, this could only come back to bite Duffy, since it was Duffy's law firm that Gibbs supposedly worked for, and sooner or later this comes around to lawyers technically working for Duffy's law firm violating procedures. As for the status of Steele Hansmeier, that seems like a pointless tangent.

Thankfully, it appeared that Judge Vadas was pretty aware of what was going on. While not as outspoken as Judge Wright, he made it clear that he wasn't buying what Duffy was selling:

At this point, Magistrate Judge Vadas broke in to ask Duffy a question. "Counsel, where are we going with this?"

"Counsel has the obligation under federal and local rules to maintain the original signature and he [Gibbs] didn't do it!" said Duffy. "He's trying to blame other people who weren't on the case. Any liability should fall upon him, as the filer."

Duffy went on. A minute later, Vadas broke in again, with the same question, asking where the line of questioning was going. Duffy was trying to show that Gibbs had changed his story as a result of a "deal" with another defense attorney in Florida, to drop sanctions against him.

"It strikes me from what I have heard so far that there's a chain of command here, and that Mr. Steele and Mr. Hansmeier were managing partners of the firm that became Prenda Law," said Vadas. "This counsel and other counsels were contract lawyers doing the heavy lifting in whatever states these lawsuits were being filed... Isn't that a fair analysis?"

Some have argued that from Duffy's performance, he appears like he's in way over his head. Of course, given all of the evidence piling up against him and his colleagues, I'm not sure how he could do any better.

Still, the best line of the day may have come after the hearing was over, when reporter Joe Mullin from Ars Technica chased down Gibbs in the hall and asked for an interview:

"I'm just trying to get on with my life," he said. "I'm pretty overwhelmed by this. There just needs to be some truth in this, in the whole matter, and that's why I came today. I don't know if they believe their own lies, at this point."

To be fair, Gibbs was a big part of that lying machine at some point, even if he was just taking orders from Steele and Hansmeier, but kudos to him for finally coming clean.

Filed Under: alan cooper, brett gibbs, delvan neville, edward chen, john steele, mark lutz, nador vadas, paul duffy, paul hansmeier
Companies: af holdings, ingenuity 13, prenda, prenda law

Irony Alert: John Steele Denies Uploading Anything Ever Despite Growing IP Evidence

from the irony-alert dept

Well, well. We recently wrote about a new filing in the Paul Oppold case in Florida, in which lawyer Graham Syfert presents very, very detailed and compelling evidence, as put together by Delvan Neville, that many of the films that Prenda sued people over were initially uploaded by John Steele. The folks over at The Pirate Bay added to this by presenting evidence that the sharkmp4 user who uploaded the works came from the very same IP address that Neville had found (among other evidence) in his findings. Basically, there's a ton of evidence that, at the very least, whoever controlled the Prenda Law domain name, also uploaded the torrent, ran a website "releasing" the movies, controlled John Steele's confirmed email account and commented on various blogs with clear insider knowledge of Prenda Law's actions.

John Steele's response? Deny, deny, deny. Here's him talking to Ars Technica:

"I have never uploaded a torrent in my life, I have never instructed anyone to do so, and I am not aware of anyone I have worked with in any capacity whatsoever (other than pirates of course). I am not sure how much more unequivocal about it I can be. I have no involvement with any case in Florida, including Mr. Oppold's case. I have not read a single document in that case. I don't intend to. As far as Mr. Syfert, you will have to ask him why he is hiring experts to try to connect me to a case I have no involvement with."

For what it's worth, Syfert didn't actually hire an expert to try to connect one to the other, but merely to investigate who did what. That a tremendous amount of evidence then poured out all pointing to John Steele is the result.

That said, here's the really ironic bit: In all of the John Steele cases of copyright trolling, in which he and his partners have been accusing people of copyright infringement and hacking computers, their "evidence" tends to be a single IP address involved in a single action, which they argue is enough information to accurately identify the person and the actions they did. Here, we not only have a single IP address, but a ton of additional information, including that identical IP address showing up in multiple places, while a variety of other evidence directly links Steele to the IP address, yet he insists it's not true. Fascinating.

One of our commenters put it all together in a single image. At this point, not only is the evidence that John Steele was directly involved in uploading the files pretty overwhelming, but on its own it's orders of magnitude more compelling than the evidence that Steele and Prenda have been using against people in court.

Filed Under: delvan neville, evidence, graham syfert, ip addresses, john steele, paul oppold
Companies: prenda, prenda law

New Filing Presents Evidence That John Steele Uploaded Videos To BitTorrent Himself

from the johnny-boy's-in-trouble dept

If you thought Graham Syfert was done with taking on John Steele and Prenda law with the closing of the Sunlust case in Florida, you'd be wrong. Today he's filed an incredible filing not just hitting back at Prenda in another case, First Time Videos vs. Paul Oppold, and asking for attorney's fees, but also including an affidavit from an actual expert (i.e., not a Prenda-style "forensic" expert) named Delvan Neville, who lays out in astounding detail how it's almost certain that John Steele himself uploaded the various videos to BitTorrent that were then used to sue various defendants for either "hacking" or copyright infringement. Oh, and in doing so, Steele appears to have made some choices that are pretty damning, including suggesting that he set up the file to effectively broadcast that it was free for the taking. In other words, there's an incredibly strong argument that the release of the file on BitTorrent was very authorized.

The work builds on some earlier research that Syfert has put out exploring how many of the Prenda-related films seemed to have been initially offered on The Pirate Bay via the same user: sharkmp4. For all the mocking that people have made concerning Prenda's "forensic" investigations into those they accuse of infringement (i.e., finding an IP address and not much else), Neville shows you how an actual investigation is done. You should read the whole thing for the layers upon layers of evidence that all seem to point the finger at John Steele.

Among other things, sharkmp4 seemed to be able to post these works on The Pirate Bay before the works were even mentioned anywhere else, and in at least one case, "sharkmp4" put a video up on The Pirate Bay three days before Prenda shell company Ingenuity 13 had even filed for the copyright. On top of that, the "forensics" company that Prenda uses -- which is supposedly run by Paul Hansmeier's brother Peter, but which had its domain registered and controlled by (you guessed it) John Steele -- apparently identified "infringements" almost immediately after the videos were placed on The Pirate Bay -- meaning they were likely looking for such infringement in conjunction with the upload.

At the end, however, Neville pulls together really damning evidence, tying together a website set up to distribute Ingenuity 13 porn films with the same exact IP address that was confirmed as being used by John Steele to log into his own GoDaddy account, highlighting how Steele -- or someone with access to his logins -- clearly has full access and control over Ingenuity 13 works. As you read through all of the evidence it appears highly likely that Steele is in control of Ingenuity 13, despite all his protests to the contrary.

As the filing notes:

Prenda Law's business structure is such that it is pirate, forensic pirate hunter, and attorney. It also appears that Prenda Law also wants to/has formed/is forming a corporate structure where it is: pornography producer, copyright holder, pornography pirate, forensic investigator, attorney firm, and debt collector. Other than the omission of appearing in the pornography themselves, this would represent an entire in-house copyright trolling monopoly- not designed to promote their own works for distribution and sale, but to induce infringement of their works and reap profits seen from mass anti-piracy litigation.

It remains to be seen if the court bothers to explore this, but I would imagine that it may be of interest in other Prenda and related cases.

Filed Under: delvan neville, graham syfert, john steele, paul duffy, paul hansmeier, paul oppold
Companies: af holdings, first time videos, ingenuity 13, prenda, prenda law