Two Lawyers Indicted in Connection With Fraudulent Lawsuits . Paul Hansmeier and John Steele would upload pornographic films, sue people who illegally downloaded them, indictment says .

reports:

A federal grand jury in Minnesota on Friday handed down indictments against two attorneys for allegedly operating a long-running, $6 million scheme involving fraudulent lawsuits brought against people who supposedly downloaded pornographic movies from file-sharing websites.

According to the publicly filed indictment, Paul Hansmeier, 35 years old, and John Steele, 45, over a period of years set up shell companies through which they bought or stashed copyrights to pornographic movies, some of which they made themselves. They then allegedly uploaded the films to file-sharing websites, in the hope of luring people to download them illegally, according to the indictment.

Once Messrs. Hansmeier and Steele had detected a critical mass of people who had downloaded the films, the lawyers would sue, ultimately threatening the users with financial penalties “and public embarrassment” unless they paid hefty settlements, typically of about $4,000, according to the indictment.


In the course of executing the scheme, prosecutors alleged, the lawyers repeatedly lied to federal and state courts on many topics, including their ownership of the companies holding the copyrights, their role in uploading the movies to file-sharing websites, and the way some people were able to download the movies.

The great moments of copyright protection.