A Virginia man has been ordered to pay $1.5 million to porn publisher Flava Works for uploading 10 of its copyrighted films to peer-to-peer networks. The default judgment, entered after defendant Kywan Fisher failed to show up in court, was the maximum penalty the judge could have imposed.

Flava Works is an avid copyright litigator. In August, the firm suffered an appeals court setback in its legal battle against a "video bookmarking" site. The firm has also been suing customers like Fisher who leak copies of its videos to peer-to-peer networks.

Flava Works says it knows Fisher was responsible for illicit uploads of 10 videos because the company "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."

Fisher, a resident of Hampton, VA, didn't show up in the Illinois federal court where the lawsuit was filed. So Judge John Lee entered a default judgment against him.

In many areas of the law, damages for civil lawsuits are tied to the actual harms caused by the defendant. But copyright law has special "statutory damages" that can be assessed without considering real-world harms. Damages can be as low as $750 per infringed work. If the infringement is "willful," it can go up to $150,000. Because Fisher was accused of willfully infringing 10 works, he now owes Flava Works $1.5 million. Judge Lee's terse order doesn't explain why he opted for the maximum penalty.

TorrentFreak points out that since Flava Works claims copies of the videos Fisher uploaded were downloaded a total of 3,449 times, this works out to $435 per download—a stiff penalty indeed.

It's also dramatically higher than has been assessed in some past default judgment cases. For example, during last decade's litigation campaign by the recording industry, defendants who failed to show up for court were often assessed damages $750 per song, the legal minimum.