Prenda seeded its own porn files via BitTorrent, new affidavit argues (original) (raw)
Extensive research charges that John Steele is Pirate Bay user sharkmp4.
Graham Syfert is a local Florida lawyer who has been defending people caught up in Prenda purported copyright suits. Last we heard from the defense attorney, he appeared to have settled some cases with the porn trolling outfit. Nearly two weeks ago, Syfert told Ars that he was still involved in two more Florida Prenda-related cases: Sunlust Pictures v. Nguyen, and First Time Videos v. Oppold.
The latter case was initially filed back in July 2012 against a Florida man named Paul Oppold. Oppold was accused of downloading an unauthorized copy of a First Time Videos (FTV) pornographic film which was being represented by Prenda.
On Monday, Syfert continued his defense of Oppold, filing a damning motion. The motion includes a 31-page affidavit and related exhibits (compressed .ZIP archive) that offer a detailed analysis and a startling conclusion about one of the primary Prenda lawyers, John Steele. According to the filing, Steele
is the most probable candidate for the identity of Pirate Bay user sharkmp4. Sharkmp4 was the originator of the only found public releases of Ingenuity 13 works prior to the creation of naughtyhotties.com. Some works were shared by sharkmp4 prior to the registered copyright date with indications of access to a higher resolution copy (more related to the direct source). Therefore further inquiry would need to be made upon John Steele, and all those within his control, to identify if he is infringing the copyrights of Ingenuity 13, AF Holdings, and others through the Pirate Bay user “sharkmp4”.
The affidavit was written by Delvan Neville, an unlikely character in this entire saga. A self-described “gamer, nerd, RHP doctoral student at Oregon State University, focus on radioecology,” Neville was hired by Syfert (to the tune of $4,000) to conduct a substantial investigation into the online practices of "6881 Forensics," the company Prenda Law uses to identify infringers. (6881 Forensics is apparently headed by Peter Hansmeier, brother of another key Prenda-linked lawyer, Paul Hansmeier.)
Ars attempted to contact Steele via one of his published e-mail addresses, but he did not immediately reply.
UPDATE Tuesday 9:10am CT: We heard back from Steele, who wrote: "I have never uploaded a torrent in my life, I have never instructed anyone to do so, and I am not aware of anyone I have worked with in any capacity whatsoever (other than pirates of course). I am not sure how much more unequivocal about it I can be. I have no involvement with any case in Florida, including Mr. Oppold's case. I have not read a single document in that case. I don't intend to. As far as Mr. Syfert, you will have to ask him why he is hiring experts to try to connect me to a case I have no involvement with."
The investigator from Oregon
In the document, Neville says that his one-man company, Amaragh Associates, provides BitTorrent monitoring services by using a program that he developed called “EUPSC2k.” The program “gathers data regarding the participants of included BitTorrent swarms.”
Neville is sort of a good-guy-gun-for-hire—after all, he’s a full-time graduate student—but he offers his services on a limited basis, a digital forensics guy.
In a Skype call with Ars on Monday afternoon, Neville told Ars that as he’s followed Prenda’s shenanigans over the last several months, he became increasingly frustrated with Prenda’s practices. Neville suggested that Prenda's practices verge on extortion.
“The behavior of the copyright trolls got me fired up,” he told Ars. “The way that they talk about infringement, it doesn't matter, all the evidence that they ever provide is an IP address and a ‘hit date’ and some bull about what city and state it is—when it's honestly not difficult to get an actual record of what kind of information has been exchanged.”
He added that he normally was "in favor" of open-source software, but in this case, he said he didn't want to help further Prenda-style lawsuits.
"If you want to get a list of people that are infringing on a file—the last thing I want to do is handing the plans of the bomb to people that want to use the bomb," he quipped.
Neville was initially introduced to Syfert through the woman behind the Fight Copyright Trolls website, someone known only by the moniker Sophisticated Jane Doe.
Soak, rinse, repeat
So what did Neville do? By his own description in the affidavit:
During a "Passive Soak" as employed in this case (hereafter “soak”), EUPSC2k does not download nor upload any pieces of potentially copyrighted material, it merely gathers data regarding the participants of included BitTorrent swarms. In this mode, EUPSC2k notifies other peers that it has no pieces for that torrent, and that it is not interested in downloading any pieces, but otherwise communicates in the same manner as a normal peer.
I was not given any information as to the nature of 6881 Forensics monitoring software, or what IP address or Internet Service Provider (ISP) that might be used in their data gathering efforts and thus my inquiry into identification of the 6881 forensics peer was blind. I examined previously gathered logs of EUPSC2k, and began several soaks of the recently collected hash values. In my examination of the data, I was looking for common peers among the many swarms, as denoted by their IP, software, peer ID and any anomalous behavior.
I was able to identify a common peer among many in the various swarms based on these techniques and several anomalous behaviors a normal peer does not exhibit. Based on the intended target of these multiple swarms, this unique common peer among the many swarms is the peer controlled by 6881 Forensics.
More specifically, Neville wrote that “Unlike those works of AF Holdings, Defendant’s counsel contacted me with the proposition that sharkmp4’s uploads of certain works copyrighted by Ingenuity 13 appear to be works that were not commercially available at the time that they were shared by sharkmp4.”
Specifically, Neville looked at the hash for the film A Peek Behind the Scenes at the Show, which was published in another Prenda court case in Virginia that was originally filed in November 2012.
References to the infohash for A Peek Behind the Scenes at the Show in complaints filed by Prenda et. al. cite their initial detection of infringement by the Doe on the same day the torrent was created by sharkmp4. Composite Exhibit “K15” In at least two instances the infringement was reported as “detected” an hour before the infohash appeared on Pirate Bay (20120821 00:54:51 GMT upload to pirate bay versus 20120821 00:09:42 & 00:42:12 UTC time of alleged infringement). How 6881 Forensics was able to detect an infringement on a swarm before it apparently existed could be explained, to some degree, if 6881 did not account for daylight savings when converting their system clock (local time) to UTC. Another alternative would be clock skew, which in networking refers to differences in the time reported by different nodes in the network, which can be considerable (on the order of tens of minutes) when transit times or distances are high. In such a case, they would still be connected to a swarm they’ve already identified as infringing on one of Ingenuity13 LLCs copyrights within minutes of its creation. Regardless, it suggests, at minimum, “insider information” between sharkmp4 and 6881 Forensics.
With this evidence now in his arsenal, Syfert, the Florida defense attorney, concluded:
Prenda Law's business structure is such that it is copyright-violating pirate, forensic pirate hunter, and attorney. It also appears that Prenda Law also wants to/has formed/is forming a corporate structure where it is: pornography producer, copyright holder, pornography pirate, forensic investigator, attorney firm, and debt collector. Other than the omission of appearing in the pornography themselves, this would represent an entire in-house copyright trolling monopoly—not designed to promote their own works for distribution and sale, but to induce infringement of their works and reap profits seen from mass anti-piracy litigation.
The judge has yet to rule on this new filing. But now that it’s part of the legal public record, it will likely will also become part of the investigation currently underway by the United States Attorney into Prenda Law.
Listing image: Aurich Lawson
Cyrus is a former Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California.
