BitTorrent Pirate Ordered to Pay $1.5 Million Damages For Sharing 10 Movies

[silicon_toad2000]

In 2011 Fisher and several other defendants were sued by adult entertainment company Flava Works. The case in question differs from the so-called “John Doe” lawsuits as the copyright holder had detailed information on the defendants who had paid accounts on the company’s movie portal.

For Fisher the trouble started when instead of just viewing the films for personal entertainment, he allegedly went on to share copies on BitTorrent. These illicit copies were traced directly back to his account through a code embedded in the videos.

“Plaintiff has proprietary software that assigns a unique encrypted code to each member of Plaintiff’s paid websites. In this case, every time the Defendant downloaded a copy of a copyrighted video from Plaintiff’s website, it inserts an encrypted code that is only assigned to Defendant. In this case, the encrypted code for Defendant is: ‘xvyynuxl’,” Flava informed the court.

Copying films was expressly forbidden in the user agreement Fisher signed with the video portal, allowing Flava to claim willful copyright infringement for 10 titles.

According to Flava the copies uploaded to BitTorrent by Fisher went on to be downloaded thousands of times.

“Defendant’s conduct was willful to the extent that he copied or distributed Flava Works, Inc.’ intellectual property at least 10 times and caused the videos to be infringed or downloaded at least 3,449 times.”

Because Fisher failed to defend himself Judge John Lee had little choice but to find Fisher guilty.

This week the Judge handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case, 10 times the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, totaling $1,500,000.

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirate-ordered-to-pay-1-5-million-damages-for-sharing-10-movies-121101/

[silicon_toad2000]

Just a bit of an expansion of this case

Porn studio Flava Works Inc said Fisher's ten videos were downloaded 3,449 times. It was pursuing 15 infringers but the cases against the others were dropped for lack of evidence. In fact, Fisher was only nicked because he was a subscriber to Flava's websites including Flavamen.com, CocoBoyz.com and Thugboy.com. This allowed him to be identified by a unique digital code Flava had embedded in the files. The licence agreement, obviously, didn't extend to sharing the works or as US law puts it, "placing them in the stream of commerce".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/02/gay_pr0n_torrenter_absent/

[DaBees-Knees]

"This week the Judge handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case, 10 times the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, totaling $1,500,000."

I hope he's got a good easy payment plan  It would be interesting to know how many years the company thinks it will take to recover that amount, if at all.

[silicon_toad2000]

provided you're ready for it, bankruptcy in most places isn't too bad, I think a fair sized portion of society could declare themselves bankrupt with little/no impact on their living std.
In Australia you can currently earn just below $50k a year before you have to begin making repayments.