BitTorrent porn video filesharer hit with $1.5 million fine

The largest ever fine levied against a BitTorrent file sharer has been handed down by an Illinois court to pornography sharer Kywan Fisher. A judge has ruled that Fisher must pay $1.5 million dollars to adult movie production hose Flava Works for damages and loss of revenue.

Sharing ten of the company’s films, that works out at $150,000 dollars per movie, the maximum amount of damages that can be claimed under current US copywright law.

Flava Works were able to pinpoint Fisher as the source of the piracy leak as he was a paid member of their pornography service, with each movie he downloaded having an encrypted, unique identifying code attached to it.

“Plaintiff has proprietary software that assigns a unique encrypted code to each member of Plaintiff’s paid websites,” said Flava’s representative in court.

“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’.”

With the evidence stacked against him and Fisher’s apparent lack of a defence (it’s unclear whether he attempted to represent himself or simply didn’t appear in court at all), the courts ruled in favour of FlavaWorks:

“Given the materials submitted by Plaintiff in support of its motion and in light of the absence of any objection by Defendant, Plaintiff’s motion for entry of default against defendant 11 is granted. Judgment is entered in favor of the Plaintiff Flava Works, Inc., and against the Defendant Kywan Fisher in the amount of One Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($1,500,000.00),” the judgment reads.

With the films downloaded more than 3,449 times from Fisher as host, that $1.5 million fine works out at $435 per download.

That’s pretty much the most expensive w*nk in recorded history we’d imagine.

Via: Torrent Freak