Prenda Law Update: Who Put the Porn on BitTorrent?

Well, the story of Prenda Law isn’t over. People associated with the Chicago law firm have been accused in California court of controlling companies that buy and/or create pornographic films and then suing people for copyright infringement when they download them on BitTorrent, but no one really knew how the films got onto BitTorrent in the first place.

Graham Syfert, a lawyer who has represented defendants in cases brought by Prenda, has long suspected that the firm had uploaded the films itself. “Almost all those shared files came from the same place,” he told me when I interviewed him in March. On his blog, Syfert detailed his suspicions that one user (account name: sharkmp4) was tied to several of the videos that Prenda sued over. To support his claim, which might encourage an Orlando court to make Prenda cover Syfert’s client’s legal costs, Syfert presented to the court the declaration of Delvan Neville, creator of a BitTorrent monitoring device, whom he’d asked to determine sharkmp4′s identity.