To Pay Bankruptcy Debts Copyright Troll's Property Seized

Copyright troll firm Prenda may be gone, but one of its principals — Paul Hansmeier — is starting to feel that you reap what you sow.

 In a bankruptcy hearing on the 3rd, Judge Sanberg ordered it converted to Chapter 7, requiring assets be seized and liquidated to pay the 2.5M+ in debts including judgments from courts around the country, as well as proceeds from the sale of Hansmeier's 1.2M condo in Minnesota. 

She justified it by saying he had a practice of deceiving the courts with his extortionate schemes.

A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, generally without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution.

When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) declared an end to its litigation campaign against music fans who used peer-to-peer technology to share music, many people thought that would be the end of mass copyright litigation—after all, hadn’t the RIAA demonstrated that suing customers was no way to improve the bottom line?

Apparently not everyone got the memo. Since then, at least three groups have begun to experiment with using mass copyright litigation to extract settlements from individuals.

These copyright trolls try to grow businesses out of suing Internet users — their tactics include targeting large groups of anonymous "Doe defendants" to improperly minimize their court costs and exploiting the massive damages in copyright law in order to pressure defendants into settling quickly.