Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness’s report on Prenda Law ( previously ), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of being sued and forever having your name linked with embarrassing pornography). The witness said that he believed that Prenda — and its principle, John Steele — had been responsible for seeding and sharing the files they accused others of pirating. After hearing about this, the administrators for The Pirate Bay dug through their logs and published a damning selection of log entries showing that many of the files that Steele and his firm accused others of pirating were uploaded by Steele himself, or someone with access to his home PC. The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files. The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs. The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable. While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far. The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]        

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Pirate Bay outs porno copyright trolls: they’re the ones pirating their own files