The lucrative business of copyright trolling has its limitations. One of the main limitations is lawyer manpower. It is relatively easy to harvest IP addresses from Bittorent swarms: poorly written software is cheap to maintain, especially given zero incentive to reduce the high number of false positives. On the other hand, when it comes to filing and maintaining dozens of cases, no software can replace actual licensed attorneys, and a single attorney cannot jump over his head and handle dozens of cases at once, albeit those cases are based on the same template. We have been witnessing what happens when a troll lawyer does not have enough self-respect to curb his greed and is overwhelmed with the number of frivolous cases he filed. Monster lawsuits that list thousands of Does were relatively easier to maintain, but they are a matter of the past: the probability of a judge busting such a case is too high, so trolls are forced to divide Does into smaller chunks to diversify their forum-shopping portfolio.

So what’s the problem? Hire more underemployed third-rate lawyers! Not so fast: finding a lawyer who is willing to bring his reputation to the altar of the Mammon is not that easy. Prenda’s Brett “Pinocchio” Gibbs’s job posting is still up for more than a month, and we witness lawyers that were conned into collaboration by master trolls running away after they realize what kind of manure they stepped in and decide that they don’t want to live with the stink.

Today I had a chance to look inside of the troll kitchen: embedded below is an email sent by one of the “troll wholesalers”, copyright-defenders.com, to various IP lawyers across the country in a hope that some would agree to be a part of a lucrative shakedown conspiracy.

Copyright-defenders.com is a German mob operation, same as Excubitor. All shakedowns they architect are based on a dubious super-secretive software and disingenuous declarations of its president Matthias Schröder-Padewet, who also supplies his “impeccable evidence” to Randazza. These fraudsters were “lucky” to work with the cream bottom slime of troll lawyers: Kenneth “Felon” Ford, Evan “Chutzpah” Stone¹ and Paul “Anal” Lesko.

As one of the attorneys who received this email commented,

…it was interesting that they are very misleading to the attorneys they are trying to recruit in that they affirmatively claim that all persons whose names are turned over are identified infringers. I think this is where some less sophisticated attorney could really get tripped up as it has already been judicially determined that an IP address does not actually identify a human let alone an infringer. I also think it is interesting that there is no indication that the attorneys have to do anything other than send “letters.” No talk about litigation, defense, discovery etc… Apart from the obvious abuse of process aspects, and I am not an expert on this, but at first glance this would seem to be a false and misleading business practice which is generally illegal under various state laws.

I hope that any lawyer who receives such email will do his research and inevitably stumble upon this post. I’m sure he will think twice before associating himself with this mob-like business and damaging his career (and karma).

Another interesting document: Excubitor service contract — it was sent to various US lawyers last year (although this contract is clearly specific to Germany, for some reason it has been written in English and distributed here).

Thanks to the readers who provided leads and links for this post.

Featured comment

houstonlawy3r says:

September 6, 2012 at 7:07 pm

I have heard about their recruitment attempts from other attorneys who were contacted by them. Apparently, even hungry lawyers can see through their pretty little website and smell a scam. I’d be surprised if the copyright troll attorneys who sign on would ever get paid. As a rule, anyone who courts you and tells you that you’ll make a million bucks (and they’ll do all the work) — RUN.

¹Mick Haig (Michael Heinz) is not only a troll pornographer but also the director/secretary of Excubitor USA. Remember the meme created by Raul: “Plaintiff’s principal, Steve Jones, retained Steve Jones to use Steve Jones’s forensic software to identify…”?