The way in which damages are calculated in piracy cases has long been known to be ridiculously inflated, but that hasn’t stopped them from being applied haphazardly. Media companies often try to through the book at any pirates they think they might actually win against. If they do win, they can then use the judgment like a cudgel in their continued attempts to cow other illegal downloaders into settling. For example, Flava Works, an adult entertainment company, has just been awarded a grand total of $1.5 million in damages from defendant Kywan Fisher. That’s the maximum possible, and sets the record for largest damages ever awarded in a BitTorrent case.

See, Fisher made the inexcusable mistake of sharing 10 movies owned by Flava Works on BitTorrent. It’s usually pretty difficult for companies to actually get charges to stick, what with IP addresses not equating to an actual person, but Flava Works actually includes a unique code embedded in all their videos. Whenever Fisher downloaded a video from the adult entertainment company’s website, it attached its encrypted code to each and every video. Fisher allegedly then shared these videos, and they still had his unique code attached to it.

In effect, Fisher left his digital fingerprints on the videos. Due to the fact that copying films was forbidden by the agreement Fisher signed with Flava Works, the company claimed willful copyright infringement on the 10 movies, and they had the evidence on their side that the videos definitely originated with Fisher’s account.

Fisher’s been hit with the maximum possible damages per title: $150,000. That means he owes an excessive $1.5 million due to sharing those 10 movies. According to TorrentFreak, that equates to $435 per alleged download. Chew on that.

(via TorrentFreak)

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