Pirate Ordered to Pay $1.5M Damages For Sharing 10 Movies

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Being sued for sharing ten porn videos on BitTorrent? I have a good idea, don't bother to show up for court so the judge is forced to slap you with a $1.5M default judgment. That'll show em'. :rolleyes:

A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.
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Wow, a 1.5 million dollar lawsuit would sure make it easy for any normal working citizen to file for bankruptcy and take care of all of those pesky lawyer fees and CC bills...
 
That sucks-- now his name is going to be forever associated with hardcore porn flicks.
 
lol sucks to be him. That's what you get for not taking something like that seriously.

And that's pretty tricky tactic, adding in encrypted data to identify the users that are uploading content.
 
It's funny because it's not like he's going to stop watching porn (or start paying for it), he's going to start watching the free stuff on all the big tube sites to further destroy the dying adult film industry.
 
OregonLAN said:
Wow, a 1.5 million dollar lawsuit would sure make it easy for any normal working citizen to file for bankruptcy and take care of all of those pesky lawyer fees and CC bills...
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Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure that he'd still be on the hook for the court ordered fines.
 
I've watched an adult video or two, and had never heard of that company. So I looked it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flava_Works "Flava Works, Inc. headquartered in Miami, Florida, with a satellite office in Chicago, Illinois, is a company that produces gay media featuring black and Latino men."
 
Don’t want to pay the $1.5 million, be a witness in some high profile mafia case so that you’ll be put in witness protection. The court-ordered fines disappear. The only thing that “might” follow you is a criminal record (if you have one). In which case if you do, that info is open only to the US Marshalls Witness Protect department
 
dr.stevil said:
lol sucks to be him. That's what you get for not taking something like that seriously.
.
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History tells us though that even if he did take it seriously they'd still slap him with a obnoxiously "illegal" sized judgement regardless, and he'd have lawyer and court fees to add to his bankruptcy filings.
 
LMAO yeah like they are going to see $1.5 mil from the average joe.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Hooray for courts encouraging extortion.
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I can agree with you to an extent for people that are caught downloading MP3s and such... but I don't have too much sympathy for this guy getting caught as the original uploader. He IS directly taking sales away from the company by making it freely available to download and should be held liable for that.

If this dummy would of shown up to court, I doubt it would be quite this severe. I wonder what the other defendants had to pay.

This isn't warning isn't put on films for the hell of it

dvdwarn1.jpg
 
Pretty meaningless since it's a civil case and he can easily discharge it in bankruptcy. They'll never see a cent of that money.
 
Eh. Doesn't bankruptcy mean they get all their assets seized to convert into money, to pay it off? Sounds like they'd get a cent or 2.
 
there all seem to be the issue he was sued in IL and he lives in VA and it could be an issue of maybe not having the money for ether a lawyer OR the time/money to travel to IL
just saying
 
Elios said:
there all seem to be the issue he was sued in IL and he lives in VA and it could be an issue of maybe not having the money for ether a lawyer OR the time/money to travel to IL
just saying
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When you're summoned to appear in federal court, you better damn well show up or respond in some way before your court date. If you just blow off a federal court date, you deserve whatever punishment they hand down.
 
Parja said:
When you're summoned to appear in federal court, you better damn well show up or respond in some way before your court date. If you just blow off a federal court date, you deserve whatever punishment they hand down.
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so some one living pay check to pay check is supposed to take off work for how ever long this all takes FIND SOME WAY to travel 1/2 way across the US right...

so ether lose every thing in trying to defend your self or let them get a default judgment and laugh when you declare bankruptcy and they get nothing if your credit is already fucked who cares
 
Parja said:
When you're summoned to appear in federal court, you better damn well show up or respond in some way before your court date. If you just blow off a federal court date, you deserve whatever punishment they hand down.
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thats the problem with the courts, someone can sue you in a completely different state (or even a completely different country) and if you don't drop EVERYTHING to appear in court (no matter how far away it is) you automatically lose and get the maximum legal penalty

Some people can barely afford the bus fare to and from work, and these people are supposed to take significant time off from work (or quit their job entirely), pack up the kids, rent a car to drive 1000 miles (assuming they even have a license) and then stay in a hotel for weeks at a time. Even if you win, you still end up paying thousands of dollars just to show up and defend yourself (and thats not even including the $100 per minute that lawyers charge nowadays)

What makes this worse, is that the $150,000 per movie fine is probably MORE than that movie has ever earned for the owners, And $1.5 million is probably more than the COMPANY makes per year, yet they expect joe shmoe to have that kind of cash just laying around.

Why sell a movie, when you can just wait for someone to pirate it and make an even bigger "RIAA profit" than the movie itself ever would have made through normal means.

The first step to fixing this is to stop allowing copyright holders to sue in federal court (or the state court of their choice), and force them to sue the person in that person's home state.
 
pothb said:
Eh. Doesn't bankruptcy mean they get all their assets seized to convert into money, to pay it off? Sounds like they'd get a cent or 2.
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No. Personal bankruptcy is actually designed to prevent that from happening. It protects a person from creditors.
 
dr.stevil said:
I can agree with you to an extent for people that are caught downloading MP3s and such... but I don't have too much sympathy for this guy getting caught as the original uploader. He IS directly taking sales away from the company by making it freely available to download and should be held liable for that.

If this dummy would of shown up to court, I doubt it would be quite this severe. I wonder what the other defendants had to pay.

This isn't warning isn't put on films for the hell of it

dvdwarn1.jpg
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It has never and will never be proven that piracy has a meaningful negative impact on the movie and music industries. The reason is because it quite simply does not. The fines and penalties for piracy are far beyond the realm of reasonable punishment. When you can outright steal the physical product or for that matter cheap people out of millions of dollars and still face far less severe consequences then pirating a movie, there is a serious problem with the system. I don't pirate or support piracy, but the simple fact is the punishments are just plain criminal. You don't ruin someone for the rest of their life for uploading 10 porno's.
 
All this does is make the legal system look like a joke.
 
The whole idea here is to allow the company to extort money from others, they are using the legal system to make an example out of this guy as a message to any of their future victims which says pay up, don't fight us or this is what you'll get. They are not expecting 1.5million from this guy, what they want is the smaller out-of-court settlement from the rest.

Only thing worse is a legal system that allow companies to carry out such extortion.
 
Let us defend the absurd justice system that slaps commercial fines onto ordinary citizens and make dumbass commentary about it. Brilliant!
 
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