California judge cites "Star Trek," stuns copyright trolls Sci-fi-lover Otis Wright quoted Spock in his ruling against a group of lawyers laying claim to a single porn video



As someone who made a certain amount of my reputation by using the Star Trek universe to illustrate the dangers of strong intellectual property law, I feel obligated to comment on the recent court decision against the entity commonly referred to as Prenda Law. The case combines copyright battles, Star Trek, and pornography — if I can slip in a picture of a cute animal, I may be able to construct the Platonic ideal of a popular Internet post.

The case, decided in the District Court for the Central District of California, concerns a group of lawyers engaged in a particularly egregious form of copyright trolling. Their strategy was to file a large number of lawsuits accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single porn video, the copyright for which was apparently assigned to one of the lawyers’ groundskeeper on the basis of a forged signature. The basis for these lawsuits was quite flimsy, but the firm had no real intention of winning the lawsuits in court. Instead, they would offer to settle — and as the court decision notes, the offer was “for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense.” This, combined with the embarrassment of being publicly linked with downloading porn, was apparently enough to extort money from a significant number of people.

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The tangled organizational web woven by the trolls is shown in the image below, taken from the court decision. It won’t shock anyone who followed This American Life’s story about patent-trolling front companies. In this case, though, the strategy of obfuscation ultimately contributed to Prenda’s undoing, as the judge concluded that its only purpose was to “shield the Principals from potential liability and to give an appearance of legitimacy.”

All of this would be signficant enough just for providing an extreme example of the way copyright law can be exploited within the American legal system — what the court decision calls “the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs.” But the author of the decision, judge Otis Wright, took things to another level entirely when he chose to write a decision littered with Star Trek references, beginning with an opening quotation from Spock in Star Trek II: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

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It only gets better from there, as Wright unloads his scorn on what he refers to as “the porno-trolling collective.” An analogy to the Borg begins by explaining why “resistance is futile” to the porn-trolling scheme, and several pages later notes that some other attorneys who colluded with the main culprits “were not merely assimilated; they knowingly participated in this scheme.” In his concluding remarks, Wright observes that

Though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage. The Court will refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California.

Watching these scumbags get their comeuppance gives this story a happy ending. But as usual, the real scandal is what’s legal. There’s no happy ending for Jammie Thomas, the working class mother of four who’s still on the hook for $222,000 for the crime of sharing 24 songs on the Internet. And while bottom-feeders like Prenda get upbraided in court, high class patent trolls like Nathan Myhrvold get puffed up as brilliant innovators by Malcolm Gladwell in the pages of the New Yorker. Unfortunately, we may yet look back on Prenda Law as the real innovators, who were just a bit too audacious and a bit too far ahead of their time.