It's been almost a year since US District Judge Otis Wright issued a sanction order repudiating the lawyers behind the "copyright trolling" organization known as Prenda Law. Since then, several other judges have pounded Prenda with expensive sanction orders. Just last week, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and John Steele—the three lawyers commonly linked to Prenda—were found to be in contempt of a devastating sanction order won by AT&T and Comcast.

Today, a Minnesota federal judge has issued an order (PDF) going in the opposite direction. US District Judge Joan Ericksen has overturned sanctions that were issued in November by a US Magistrate Judge in her district, Franklin Noel.

Like Wright, Noel asked his local US Attorney to take a look into Prenda. He also ordered Prenda to pay back the four defendants who settled cases in his court for amounts ranging from $3,500 to $6,000 in addition to their legal fees. That order was stayed while Ericksen could consider Prenda's objections. Now she has considered their objections and found them convincing.

Noel overstepped his bounds as a magistrate judge, Ericksen writes in today's order—something that AF Holdings, a Prenda shell company, repeatedly pointed out.

"[T]he Court did not refer the actions to the magistrate judge to determine whether AF Holdings had committed a fraud on the court," wrote Ericksen. "AF Holdings consistently objected to the magistrate judge's authority to determine whether AF Holdings had committed a fraud on the Court. The magistrate judge had no such authority."

Ericksen spends a page pointing out that as a federal magistrate, Noel isn't what is called an Article III judge. Despite that, Noel improperly "relied on the inherent power of the Court to determine whether it has been a victim of fraud," and it sounds like Ericksen doesn't approve of how he wielded that power.

The order also gives short shrift to long-standing accusations of forgery and identity theft that have been present in the Prenda saga. Recall that the Prenda shell AF Holdings, which sued hundreds of people, involved copyrights to adult movies. The copyright transfers were signed by John Steele's former housekeeper, Alan Cooper; but Cooper later came forward and said his signature was forged.

Those allegations have been taken seriously by judges, like Noel and Wright, who talked about Prenda lawyers committing "fraud on the court." But today Ericksen has found that the AF Holdings copyright assignments are valid, even though she notes that Cooper disputes the signatures.

The assignor in the copyright transfer for the two movies at issue, Popular Demand and Sexual Obsession, is listed as Raymond Rogers. "That he actually did execute the assignments has not been questioned," notes Ericksen. The issue of Cooper's signature was "immaterial" when Ericksen decided to grant expedited discovery to AF Holdings.

The order ends with this sentence, which comes close to suggesting that using a forged document would be fine: "AF Holdings’ submission of the agreements with Cooper’s signatures—legitimate or not, authorized or not—to evince the transfer of the copyrights to AF Holdings did not amount to a fraud on the Court."

For the Prenda-linked lawyers, Ericksen's order will surely be seen as vindication in what has been a difficult year. It could be paraphrased as: "Thanks, but you're not a real judge. And the copyright is valid, even if the signature was forged."

Listing image by Flickr user: Nathan Meijer