As the minutes tick off until the Prenda hearing today, yet another bit of news has dropped in relation to the case. Verizon has stepped in and filed a declaration stating that contrary to Brett Gibbs' own claims to the court, it does not appear Gibbs informed Verizon not to follow through and identify the people in the subpoena that had originally been sent.

To understand what happened here, the key aspect to many Prenda cases is getting the identity of people associated with IP addresses, often by getting a court to grant discovery, after which Prenda's lawyers send subpoenas to ISPs with a list of IP addresses. As has happened a few times, courts readily grant the request for expedited discovery (which is rarely denied in normal court cases), but upon learning of Prenda's overall practices, they then pull back that permission and (usually) order the lawyers to immediately inform the ISPs that the order has been withdrawn and not to comply with the subpoena. Here, the same thing happened, and Prenda's Brett Gibbs told the court that he informed ISPs that the order had been withdrawn.

Just a little while ago, however, Verizon stepped in to the case, with a declaration saying they never received any notice of the withdrawal, and had, instead, complied with the subpoena, believing it was valid.

Having Verizon come out and more or less directly state that Gibbs lied to the court isn't going to go over well when it appears that Judge Wright is already not happy with Gibbs or his buddies at Prenda...