Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.

Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele’s favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele’s “vile scheme” but agreed that given Steele’s extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney’s recommendation of five years was “eminently fair.”

Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years.

Steele at the hearing said he had made “stupid decisions,” and his own attorney agreed that his client’s actions were “reprehensible, abhorrent, and criminal,” adding, “I wish I did not like John as much as I do.”

Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.

The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers “stealing” certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.

Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.

But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies’ content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys’ pockets.

Hansmeier’s law license was suspended in 2016 and Steele was disbarred in 2017, while the criminal cases were in progress.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1533759