Magistrate Judge John O’Sullivan (Southern District of Florida) is seemingly too busy to look around and see what’s going in this country (or even in his district). A majority of judges is fed up with the ongoing abuse of courts by an invasive species of porno copyright trolls, but apparently not all the judges communicate with each other and some rely solely on the sweet-tongued troll lawyers, who have perfected the tricky art of lying while looking straight into the eyes.

On June 29 Judge O’Sullivan denied motions to quash and for protective order filed by four does, represented by Daniel Simon and Bradford Patrick (First Time Videos, LLC v. Does 1-76, 1:12-cv-20921). The judge declared that “there is a minimal expectation of privacy for information provided to internet providers,” apparently not being aware how blatantly this information is misused. Although this ruling is unfortunate, decisions like this become rarer as the case law is being developed and the unprecedented mass abuse of the judicial system gains publicity.

This decision was interpreted by a John Steele’s disciple, immature troll Joseph Perea, in a very crooked way: he decided that if motions were denied, defense counsels must have dropped their clients automatically (see Exhibit B linked below)! As a result, at least two Does still (of course!) represented by Daniel Simon of Lalchandani Simon PL, started receiving harassing mails and phone calls in violation of one of the most obvious and hard-to-misinterpret Rules of Ethics: a lawyer absolutely cannot directly contact an opposing party if the latter retained an attorney.

Thus, Lanchandani Simon has moved for sanctions and requested a hearing. It was not an opportunistic way to attack an opposing party: according to Daniel Simon, this is not the first time Prenda has shown the middle finger to the Rule of Ethics:

The undersigned counsel files this motion for sanctions begrudgingly, and only after having confronted this issue several other times in identical circumstances.

Even if a judge is misled regarding the nature of these shake-down lawsuits, I don’t’ see why he should tolerate the arrogant disregard of rules by a green lawyer.

Also, Daniel Simon does a good job analyzing the content of the ransom letter, exposing additional highly unethical statements (in particular, those that discourage putative defendants from retaining a counsel).

• Exhibit A: Declaration of a Doe who was inappropriately contacted by Perea.
• Exhibit A-1: Prenda’s demand letter. (Note that Prenda recently dropped its Florida address from its letterhead.)
• Exhibit B: Email correspondence between Perea and Kubs Lalchandani.

To the best of my knowledge, Joseph Perea is currently investigated by the Florida Bar. I believe that dropping the Florida address from the ransom letter is somehow related to this fact, as well as attempts to mislead courts by listing Perea as an independent (from Prenda) attorney on the court filings. I hope this motion and exhibits will find their way to the investigators’ desk.