Court Orders Online Pirate To Pay $1.5 Million In Damages

Piracy cases have become more or less a norm as thousands of such cases have been launched against common users to date. Typically, the case is launched by the entity which has copyrights of the content in question. While most such cases are usually inconclusive, a court has now ordered a BitTorrent pirate to ogle up a hefty $1.5 million for sharing 10 movies online.


Piracy

Kywan Fisher has been involved in a case with Flava Works over the sharing of certain adult movies. Flava Works, who originally owns these movies, alleges that Fisher had an account with the company. The account allowed him to view the adult movies but not to share them.

However, Fisher downloaded these movies and started sharing them through BitTorrent. Flava Works holds this as damage done to business and took Fisher to the court. Most piracy-related cases don’t reach a conclusive end because the plaintiff is not able to furnish enough proof to implicate the alleged culprit.

But in this case, Flava Works had enough proof. According to the company, each of its videos have a unique embed code which is account-specific. So by determining this code in the movies shared online, it was able to discern that Fisher was behind it all and thus, able to nab him.

Flava told during the hearing, ‘Plaintiff 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. In this case, the encrypted code for Defendant is: ‘xvyynuxl’.’

The evidence was sufficient to make the court go for a firm decision. To top it further, Fisher didn’t defend himself at all during the case. Flava asked the court to implicate him in sharing 10 movies illegally and court agreed to that.

The judgement given by the court read, ” 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).”

Courtesy: Torrent Freak

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

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