John Steele, an anti-piracy “pay-up-or-else” lawyer, has filed close to 100 mass-lawsuits for his clients, targeting thousands of BitTorrent users, a.k.a. Pirates. Now it seems the moniker could even fit Mr. Steele himself. The folks over at TorrentFreak have pointed out that some information from Steele’s site was blatantly ripped off a competitor.
This is nothing new in the copyright lawyer enforcement game. Just last year it was reported that the U.S. Copyright Group ripped off the entire site from the Copyright Enforcement Group and passed it off as their own. The site was eventually taken down.
In regards to Steele, he too stole from CEG, blatantly ripping off content from their FAQ. You can see it for yourself below.
If you’re wondering if Steele had permission to extract content from CEG, he didn’t. TorrentFreak contacted CEG, they said that they “may take steps to prevent Steele from blatantly ‘stealing’ their work in the future“.
This whole situation is laughable when you consider Steele’s whole “holier than though” mantra on piracy.