Paul Hansmeier, the infamous “porn troll” lawyer who along with two law partners terrorized thousands of porn viewers with legal threats and made millions off the scheme, has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges two years after he was first arrested, according to a report by The Minneapolis Star Tribune on Friday.
But Hansmeier’s own lawyers say that even with the guilty plea, the seemingly interminable case is not over yet.
"The plea agreement allows Mr. Hansmeier to appeal the denial of his pretrial motion to dismiss the indictment," said Manny Atwal, who represents Hansmeier, as quoted by the Ars Technica technology news site. "I think we came to a fair resolution and will see what happens at sentencing and the 8th circuit."
The scheme cooked up by Hansmeier and his partner John Steele, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges last year involved their Minnesota law firm Prenda Law, uploading copyrighted porn vides to torrent sites, where they could be downloaded using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer file sharing software.
But the Prenda lawyers would track each download to an individual person, and then contact that person asking for a $3,000 “settlement” to prevent them from filing a potentially costly and embarrassing copyright infringement lawsuit, according to TechDirt.
In some cases, the partners had used fictitious legal entities to obtain the copyrights to the porn videos they uploaded. But as the scheme went on, according to a report by Ars Technica, the lawyers found it more efficient to become porn producers themselves, creating and uploading their own porn, then tracking and threatening anyone who downloaded it from a torrent site such as Pirate Bay.
According to a 2016 federal indictment against them, Hansmeier and Steele collected about $6 million from frightened porn downloaders who fell victim to their “trolling” scheme.
Photo by Carlos Suarez / Wikimedia Commons
