While the Mountain Goats may have sung about the “Best ever death metal band out of Denton,” few people are singing the praises of Evan Stone, a Denton, Texas attorney that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has dubbed a “copyright troll.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld sanctions (PDF) against Stone on Thursday for having issued 670 unauthorized subpoenas to the ISPs of unnamed John Doe defendants who were accused of infringing copyright by downloading unauthorized copies of a German porn film, Der Gute Onkel (The Good Uncle). Stone represented the film’s producer, Mick Haig.

Stone issued subpoenas to Internet service providers, hoping to unmask those who had downloaded Mick Haig's porn—but he did so before the judge in the case had agreed. When some of the Does contacted the attorneys provided by the court to defend their interests (from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen), the gambit was revealed, and the attorneys moved to sanction Stone. Stone dropped the case, but it wasn't enough to halt the sanctions bid. The district court judge agreed that Stone's conduct had shown "staggering chutzpah" and fined him $10,000 in addition to other penalties. That sanction was appealed and has now been upheld by the Fifth Circuit.

“The court characterized Stone’s actions as a ‘grave’ and ‘wanton’ ‘abdication of responsibility,’ transforming the use of subpoenas ‘from a bona fide state-sanctioned inspection into private snooping,’ and noted that Stone has abused the subpoena power before in other cases,” the judges wrote in the Fifth Circuit decision.

The Fifth Circuit court also has required that a copy of this decision be filed in all of Stone’s other cases, involving defendants all over the country.

Last year, a Texas judge severed the defendants and quashed Stone's subpoenas in nearly all cases that he had pending at the time.

The Court concluded: “The stay of sanctions is therefore vacated, and any sanctions imposed by the district court are affirmed.”

Counsel doubles down, ignores sanctions, and presses on

When reached for comment, Evan Stone waved off the fact that he violated judicial procedure.

“They just punted, and said you waived your arguments, so we have to affirm,” he told Ars Friday morning. “I'm ready for someone to take this up, this issue of copyright subpoenas in the Fifth Circuit. That's really the bigger issue. I'm just going to move on from this whole sanction thing. I think it's bullshit and I think it shouldn't have happened. I’d rather move on with my life than be right. That's what I’m going to do. We're going to do some more copyright subpoenas, and we're going to bring them before the district and see if they are accepted or denied and then bring them before the Fifth Circuit.”

The EFF, for its part, applauded the sanctions brought against Stone.

“What we're concerned about now is improper legal basis for pursuing these kind of dragnets for these kind of legal cases,” said Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney with the EFF.

Stone has a decided history of filing thousands of such cases in Texas, and he goes about his method in more or less the same way each time. He’ll present a judge with a list of IP addresses that he believes are tied to copyright violations. Then he’ll ask the court to authorize a subpoena to an ISP that would yield the real name and identifying information.

Once the Denton counsel has that, he sends out letters to the defendants, asking for settlements of a few thousands dollars each, instead of going to litigation. Many see this procedure as a sort of legal shakedown, particularly when it involves not illegal but often embarrassing content, like pornographic films.

But the Texas lawyer asserts that he’s very careful about how he works with who he targets.

“I don't go about it the way those other assholes do,” he said. “I handle this stuff so delicately. They're calling people at work, they're leaving voicemails messages! I've never done that shit. The few times I've handled cases for adult and in particular gay studios, I handle that extremely delicately. I've spoken to closeted gay men. They're terrified. [I tell them]: ‘I'm not busting your balls because I'm trying to ruin your life, I'm trying to recoup some lost revenue for the studios.’”

He also says that he is often willing to file on behalf of the defendant to stay anonymous.

But beyond his questionable legal tactics, Stone lamented the fact that larger ISPs, like Verizon, (against whom he filed a subpoena in late May 2012 over a pirated work of anime in an ongoing case) fight him “tooth and nail,” while smaller ISPs simply “cough up the user information.”

And, he argues, Verizon isn’t protecting their users out of principle or out of an interest in legal fairness, but rather to protect their highest-paying customers, which, according to Stone, are pirates.

“There is no commercially available service that can even take advantage of the top-tier bandwidth,” he said. “You don't need 50Mbps down to use Hulu, Netflix, iTunes or anything. Who the hell pays for 50Mbps down? P2P file-sharers. That's who pays. That's on the Internet side, they're making profits from those who want to file-share.”