Bittorrent Pirate to pay $1.5M

Would be porn pirate Kywan Fisher has just had the shock of his life after declining to defend himself in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by porn producer Flava Works in the USA.

In what is believed to be the biggest ever file sharing award the Court levied the maximum $150,000 fine per movie making a total of $1,500,000 fine for distributing the ten copyrighted movies.

Fisher had downloaded the movies from Flava’s online pay to view service then uploaded and shared the contents via bittorrent. Unknown to Fisher though was the fact that Flava Works watermark all the movies they transmit online with a unique code personal to that individual subscriber, in this case Fisher.

Flava Works were therefore able to produce evidence showing that the films were all watermarked with the code specific to Fisher’s account and had been either viewed or downloaded 3,449 times.

Flava Works claimed deliberate and “wilful copyright infringement” and US Judge John Lee noted in his summation that in view of the lack of any defence he was forced to issue a default judgement in favour of the Plaintiff.

Fisher has been unavailable for comment and it’s not clear whether he intends to appeal or face bankruptcy. Ironically though, Fisher was one of fifteen people originally pursued by Flava Works and all these other cases were dropped earlier in the year due to lack of evidence.

Whatever Fisher is thinking now though not defending himself was clearly a very costly and colossal mistake.

TorrentFreak has more on this story here.