Poor Kywan Fisher just wanted to have his fill of lonely entertainment. He downloaded 10 of Flava Works’ adult movies, hooking them up to BitTorrent in the process; what a mistake that turned out to be. He’s just been ordered to fork out a cool $US1.5 million for the privilege, the largest damages fine ever awarded, in one of only a handful of piracy cases that has actually made it to court. Don’t mess with the porn barons.
Fisher’s mistake was to be a paid-up member of Flava Works’ smut site in the first place. He legitimately downloaded the 10 pornos, but then decided they were so, um, good that the whole world should see them. He promptly shared them on BitTorrent for all, not knowing that Flava Works embeds its videos with the personal information from the purchaser, allowing it to instantly track the pirated videos straight back to Fisher. Ouch.
Considering Flava Works had hard evidence, and Fisher signed a contract with the smut studio against sharing the moment he downloaded the movies, it was an open and shut case. The irony is that the 10 movies Fisher shared were only downloaded 3449 times — that’s $US470 a download. Something tells me that so wasn’t worth it. [TorrentFreak via Gizmodo UK]