Hopefully Jim was able to give him a couple of lifetime licenses to JRiver that were worth $8,000.
I think you may have read that backwards.
TLDR Backstory:
Paul Hansmeier is (or was) one of the primary forces behind Prenda Law, which was one of the most aggressive (and disgusting) of the porn-copyright trolling lawsuit "organizations" out there over the past couple years. Their basic modus operandi was to send letters to people who may (or may not have, they didn't try to find out basically at all) have downloaded porn illicitly, threatening to sue them and tell their neighbors all the horrible porn things they were downloading, and said if you pay us $3k now, we'll go away quietly.
Extortion, basically. Their game
backfired quite famously. Prenda Law is defunct, and they personally owe
all kinds of penalties for all sorts of bad behavior. Of course, the $4.4M+ they collected with their extortion racket is all vanished. So it goes.
Now that the free porn-threatening ride is over, it seems Paul has moved on to suing small businesses (well, not actually suing, as that would cost money, just threatening to sue) who may or may not have ADA violations, on behalf of disabled "complainants" who, in at least one case, had no idea this was going on. New extortion racket, different name and target.
So...
This douchenozzle didn't pay
Jim anything. We don't know what happened, of course, and I'm sure Jim can't comment (and can delete this thread if you want -- I'm just an unrelated commenter), but one can assume from the reporting that Jim
paid this douchenozzle $8k for the privilege of being left alone. That's horrible, but sadly not surprising. That's exactly the problem with these "companies" (which are, in my opinion, a hop-skip-and-a-jump from organized crime style racketeering)... What was his choice? Spend 10X as much defending himself against a lawsuit he'd almost certainly win in the end?
Not many people can do that. When they did with this character in the past, it ended up blowing up the whole operation. That's great, but the people in those cases took huge risks (and had, largely, pro bono defenses). Not everyone can afford to do that.
Also, I'll add, since they've threatened litigious action for stuff like this before: I don't work for JRiver and do not represent them. Any statements I've made here are my own opinion based on following the cases very closely, but I'm not a lawyer, and I'm mostly talking out of my lower extremities. Still, in my opinion, this guy is a douchenozzle and assclown and deserves everything he got from the courts recently. I hope these latest exploits lead to more trouble for him in the end.
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Topic: Jim Has a Run-In With Prenda Law Jerk, and Ends Up on Ars (Read 12999 times)