This article is more than 1 year old

US Feds investigating Prenda Law, say Pirate Bay co-founders

Self-seeding copyright troll's log files trawled, apparently

It looks like there's more trouble approaching for the notorious copyright trolls, formerly of Prenda Law.

TorrentFreak says the FBI is taking a more active interest in the operation, saying that Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij were questioned about Prenda's notorious “honeypot” operation while they were in prison.

The honeypot was a key part of Prenda's copyright trolling: the company would create torrents of its own movies (using the account Sharkmp4), and threaten those who downloaded the movies with lawsuits.

TorrentFreak says the FBI's interest was revealed to Sunde and Neij by the Swedish police that questioned them during their spell in prison.

Sunde is quoted as saying “I was told that Prenda Law has been under investigation for over a year, and from the printouts they showed me, I believe that”.

The Feds apparently hoped that Sunde would be able to hand over either backups or logs from The Pirate Bay, something he couldn't provide since he's no longer associated with the site and the files are encrypted anyway.

IP address logs are also of interest to the Feds, Sunde told TorrentFreak.

So far there's been no public announcement by the FBI. However, given the pasting Prenda got from an appeal judge in America in May, and its own high-risk strategy of risking criminal charges, an investigation would be no surprise. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like