Prenda's Paul Duffy Claims To Be 'Too Devastated' By Nelson Mandela's Death To Comment

from the wtf dept

Yesterday, lawyer Nick Ranallo, one of the many lawyers who’s been instrumental in taking down Prenda Law, filed a notice in the Navasca case, saying that they (he and his client, Joe Navasca) were satisfied that Prenda had paid up the attorneys fees owed, which Judge Chen had ordered back in July. The amount was $22,531.93, which is significantly less than other courts have told Prenda to fork over in other cases (totaling up to about $500,000 last I’d checked), and it appears that Team Prenda decided to fork over the cash, perhaps out of the nearly $2 million the company took in last year.

But the really incredible part in this is that when reporter Joe Mullin, from Ars Technica, reached out to Prenda’s Paul Duffy to comment on whether or not Prenda had paid up the fees, Duffy responded in the most bizarre way possible:

I hope you are doing well. I am devastated by the loss of Nelson Mandela and I hope you join with President Obama in remembering his legacy. He ranks with Mohandes Ghandi, Dr. King and President Kennedy in the struggle for human rights over the past 50 years. There are larger issues than the ability to steal porn… You seem like a nice guy. Thanks.

Yes, the copyright porn trolling lawyer, whose firm has been implicated in setting up bogus honeypots to shake people down, in forging signatures and in efforts to publicly embarrass people (oh, and whose wife more or less admitted that her husband was engaged in interstate extortion) is now claiming that he’s “devastated” by the loss of Mandela, and talking about “the struggle for human rights.” That’s a laugh. I’d guess he’s a bit more devastated about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’s on the hook for and the criminal and tax evasion charges he may be facing before very long.

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Companies: prenda, prenda law

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Comments on “Prenda's Paul Duffy Claims To Be 'Too Devastated' By Nelson Mandela's Death To Comment”

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49 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Someone should make a movie

About what happens when lawyers take over the world, similar in concept to Idiocracy, but the main premise would be that rather than everyone in the future being idiots, nobody would communicate ANYTHING in sentences shorter than 100 words or they would be completely ignored….

Lawyers seem to have a need to over complicate things that should be relatively simple.

It would be called, Verbocracy. (TM, Copyrighted, Patent Pending… one time use licenses of my idea available for the low low price of $1 million bitcoins)

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Someone should make a movie

And if you repeated ANY sentence that someone else had already used you’d be sued for infringement so sentences would get longer and more bizarre with randomly inserted words here and there to stave off the lawsuits.

Also, because the world is run by lawyers, NOT being sued at least once a month would be ‘felony interference of a business model’…..

OldGeezer (profile) says:

Re: Someone should make a movie

The Prenda story would make a great comedy. No writing required, just court transcripts and correspondence. You just can’t write funnier shit than this. The line when Judge Wright instructs them to attend Pro Se classes is a riot. The audience would laugh their ass off and then stand and cheer at the final scene when they are loaded on the prison bus. Who would we get to play them? Unfortunately Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp have all passed.

Christenson says:

Re: Re: I just thought I'd sow some doubt as to your identity if it is ever unmasked!

Remember, I have zero PROOF as to what’s between your legs, or even that you are a single individual. It’s just not important to me.

Now, I have to admit I like the counter theory of “Baffling e’m with Brilliant Bull****”, just below, it would be sufficient!

Anonymous Coward says:

The perfect defense.

If Johnnie Cochran can use the Chewbacca defense then by god I’ll use Paul Duffy’s Nelson Mandela defense the next time I fuck up.

Caught cheating
Sorry, Mandela

Forgot to take out the trash
Sorry, Mandela

Traffic accident insurance exchange
Sorry, Mandela

Intoxicated indecent exposure
Sorry, Mandela

Busted with drugs
Sorry, Mandela

Murdering a hooker
Sorry, Mandela

Cooking meth
Sorry, Mandela

Break your drug dealers bong
Sorry, Mandela

Sheogorath (profile) says:

What he meant

I hope you are doing well, I think. I am pretending to be devastated by the loss of Nelson Mandela because it seems like the canny thing to do at the moment, and I hope you join with President Obama in remembering his legacy. He ranks with Mohandes Ghandi, Dr. King and President Kennedy in the struggle for human rights over the past 50 years, whereas I don’t even rank with what passed from his bowels. There are larger issues than the ability to steal from people by threatening to expose their porn habits in a public setting… You seem like a much nicer guy than I am. Thanks.
FTFY, Paul Duffy.

That Anonymous Coward (profile) says:

Re: Re:

Tech – Prenda and its magical tracking software.
Dirt – The fact they created the events to profit from.
Copyright – abusing an outdated law to extort money.
Anything else – The longest running comedy on the Judicial system where the staunch “defenders of copyright” are shown once again to be lying cheating idiots undone by a group of people online.

Or were you not keeping up with the story and just needed to flog your usual Mike bashing because it was time for you to feel special again?

Anonymous Coward says:

Duffy response is one of the best most briliant responses I have ever heard given to a reporter.

Think about it. If the reporter quotes him he does not look guilty by having said ‘No Comment’.

The response can not be used in a court of law as it looks and feels like it is the answer to some other question the reported pasted into as the answer to the ask question.

The answer tells you nothing about the case or anything else controversial either for that matter.

In fact this is exactly the response my ex boss (40 years ago and dead now) would give when we would go through customs in a foreign country especially South America. In a case of selective memory instantaneously he would forget any and all languages except Southern Red Neck English. He was fluent in a at least a dozen. All answers would become tourist nonsense. As far as equipment smuggling was concerned we would take literally truck loads of essential test equipment used for power plant construction into and out of countries with little or no correct paperwork while tourist had their bags inspected for the slightest custom violation.

OldGeezer (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

I’m sure you must be joking that you don’t know N.A. is Narcotics Anonymous. Like A.A. only for dopers. In case you are wondering, I haven’t used since. I had a good paying job that I nearly lost. They started doing random drug tests about that time so I stayed clean. They were kind of picky about that since I was running crane loads of heavy parts over people’s heads.

mcinsand (profile) says:

December 14?

Am I correct in remembering that Prenda has to fork over or post bond for $261k on or by December 14? There is a thread on Popehat (use keywords ‘Popehat,’ ‘Prenda,’ and ‘Hammer’ to find it) that was discussing whether they would lose rights to appeal if they failed to come up with money or bond. Not that they would ignore court instructions or due dates, of course. It would be nice to have fireworks for Christmas, especially if this crowd was on the receiving end.

Hahaha says:

Re: Response to: sophisticatedjanedoe on Dec 7th, 2013 @ 9:01pm

She is in denial. On Facebook, Shari Duffy confesses they have no money, yet goes out almost every night to what seems to be an overrated party.. Someone needs to tell her it’s time to get a REAL job and take care of her kids because Daddy might be going to prison soon.

Anonymous Coward says:

I hope you are doing well. I am devastated by the loss of Nelson Mandela and I hope you join with President Obama in remembering his legacy. He ranks with Mohandes Ghandi, Dr. King and President Kennedy in the struggle for human rights over the past 50 years.

Considering that the only one of those three who was even alive in the past 50 years was Dr. King, I have to wonder what Mr. Duffy is thinking.

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