One of the more incredible allegations about Prenda Law—the porn copyright-trolling operation that sued people for downloading movies online—was that the lawyers behind it might have created and uploaded some of the porn in question simply as a way to catch more offenders.

As a financial strategy, this made a certain amount of sense. After all, when suing on behalf of a client, you pass most of the settlement money on to them; sue on your own and you can keep it all.

But it's not a great look in a court of law, especially when you go out of your way to purposely conceal the arrangement through a complex maze of shell companies and offshore entities. This is the sort of behavior that might lead to disbarment or even a prison cell. Not even obvious boundary pushers like Prenda's John Steele and Paul Hansmeier would run this kind of a crazy risk... would they?

Shark attack

Rumors about Prenda's possible shift from "legitimate if aggressive copyright law firm" to "porn producers" began to circulate in June 2013, fueled by Florida lawyer Graham Syfert. Syfert was defending a man in a Prenda lawsuit, and he hired a grad student from Oregon State to investigate Prenda's BitTorrent practices. The grad student, Delvan Neville, raised questions about whether the "sharkmp4" account used to upload one of the films to the Pirate Bay might in fact belong to John Steele.

"Further inquiry would need to be made upon John Steele, and all those within his control, to identify if he is infringing the copyrights of Ingenuity 13, AF Holdings, and others through the Pirate Bay user 'sharkmp4'," Neville concluded.

At the time, John Steele told Ars, "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."

This statement caught the attention of Pirate Bay operators. Later that week, the Pirate Bay released information claiming that some of the porn files Prenda had sued over were linked to an IP address "previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account."

Two months later, in a Georgia court case, Comcast confirmed that one of the IP addresses at issue in the case was linked to Steele and Hansmeier.

But the two attorneys continued to deny involvement—and not just to sites like Ars. In 2013, Hansmeier signed, under oath, a declaration saying, "I have never created a Pirate Bay account in my life and categorically deny ever uploading and/or downloading any BitTorrent files of any past client of mine, including AF Holdings."

That's a dangerous thing to assert, especially when facing a hostile judge (who eventually recommended that Steele and Hansmeier be investigated by the feds). Assuming that Hansmeier and Steele wanted to get rich, not go to jail, I continued to wonder what was really going on.