Govt. Seeks 150-Month Sentence for Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier

MINNEAPOLIS – In court documents filed Monday, prosecutors asked the court to issue a sentence of 150 months in prison for Paul Hansmeier, one of the principal attorneys from the notorious –  and now-defunct – copyright-trolling law firm Prenda Law.

Hansmeier entered a guilty plea last summer, in which he pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Hansmeier had been charged with 17 counts in the indictment, but the other 15 were dismissed as part of his plea agreement. The plea agreement was entered on a conditional basis, under which Hansmeier reserved the right to appeal the court’s decision to deny his motion to dismiss the charges against him.

In the sentencing recommendation document filed Monday, prosecutors assert that Hansmeier “was the driving force behind this massive scheme” undertaken by Prenda Law.

“It was Hansmeier who came up with the idea to construct a copyright settlement mill focused on pornographic films,” the prosecutors wrote. “It was Hansmeier who directed his brother to upload clients’ movies onto file-sharing websites to lure downloaders. It was Hansmeier who drafted nearly all of the legal pleadings used to deceive judges. It was Hansmeier who invented phantom hacking allegations. And it was Hansmeier who lied to judges, dissembled in depositions, and coerced others to conceal the truth.”

In calling for the lengthy sentence, the prosecutors emphasized in Monday’s filing that Hansmeier “repeatedly deceived courts” concerning the copyright lawsuits he and his Prenda confederates filed. They also detailed the “honeypot” scheme Prenda used, wherein they seeded torrents with the very content that was at issue in the lawsuits.

“First, Hansmeier instructed his brother, Peter Hansmeier, to upload ‘torrent files’ to BitTorrent websites such as the Pirate Bay, affirmatively to induce people to steal his clients’ copyrighted pornographic movies,” prosecutors wrote. “Paul Hansmeier selected the pornographic movies for his brother to upload based upon how attractive they would be to BitTorrent users, thus deliberately encouraging the piracy Hansmeier pretended to hate.”

Prosecutors noted that among the many misrepresentations Hansmeier and his peers made to the court was concealing the fact he had an ownership interest in the companies he was representing in many of the cases Prenda brought before the court.

“Hansmeier misrepresented in every case brought on behalf of ‘AF Holdings,’ ‘Ingenuity 13,’ and ‘Guava LLC’ that these plaintiffs were owned by others when, in fact, Hansmeier and Steele beneficially owned these companies,” the prosecutors wrote. “Hansmeier concealed that he and Steele were the real parties in interest because he knew that many judges would scrutinize the requests for subpoena authority more carefully if the lawyers bringing the cases were also the parties in interest. Hansmeier went to great lengths to disguise this fact, including – as discussed below – committing and suborning perjury.”

The prosecutors also noted that Hansmeier “concealed from the courts that he filmed and produced much of the pornography in this case himself, not for commercial distribution, but for the sole purpose of using the resulting pornographic movies as bait.”

“In fact, in each of the copyright infringement complaints relating to his self-generated pornographic movies, in which the purported plaintiff was Hansmeier’s alter ego ‘Ingenuity 13,’ Hansmeier alleged that the sham company had been ‘damaged by Defendant’s conduct, including but not limited to economic and reputation losses,’” the prosecutors wrote in their sentencing request. “This allegation was untrue. Hansmeier never distributed these self-produced videos (principally ‘Five Fan Favorites’ and a ‘Peek Behind the Scenes at the Show’) commercially. Therefore, their ‘infringement’ could not have caused economic damages (much less reputation losses) to Ingenuity 13, which had no commercial operations.”

The 16-page sentencing request details a wide variety of other misconduct on Hansmeier’s part, including his use of proxies to conceal his involvement in the scheme (“Hansmeier repeatedly caused other people to do things that he would later deny doing himself”), misrepresenting and exaggerating the role of certain underlings (“Hansmeier then later falsely claimed that a trust called ‘Salt Marsh’ owned the entities, and a man named Mark Lutz, a paralegal who worked for Prenda Law, was the ‘manager’”) and money laundering.

In concluding their recommendation that Hansmeier serve a lengthy prison sentence, the prosecutors pulled no punches in characterizing his conduct. They also observed that Hansmeier has not exactly been contrite about the crimes to which he has (conditionally) pleaded guilty.

“In summary, Hansmeier was greedy, arrogant, devious, mendacious, and consistently positioned other people to be damaged by his conduct, even as he enjoyed the proceeds of the scheme he orchestrated,” the prosecutors wrote. “Even now, Hansmeier continues to accept responsibility only in conditional terms, hoping to convince the appeals court that his shocking abuse of his position of trust as a Minnesota attorney, and an officer of its courts, was somehow legal.”

“For the foregoing reasons, the United States respectfully recommends that the Court sentence Mr. Hansmeier to 150 months’ imprisonment, a sentence within the guidelines range applicable to Hansmeier’s scheme,” the prosecutors wrote in concluding their request. In a footnote to that final paragraph, the prosecutors noted that “in the plea agreement, the government agreed not to recommend a sentence above 150 months.”

In other words, the government would have asked for Hansmeier to face a longer prison sentence, had it not previously agreed not to do so. In a word…. Ouch.