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Two men are being ordered to pay $1.5 million each for uploading gay pornographic movies to file-sharing sites without permission from the Florida distributor, Flava Works.
Both Cormelian Brown (.pdf) of Delaware and Kywan Fisher (.pdf) of Virginia were ordered to pay the maximum $150,000 fine for each of 10 Flava Works films a judge concluded that they separately uploaded to Gay-Torrents.net and other sites.
The damages, the maximum allowed under law, are the highest ever in BitTorrent cases.
By comparison, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first music file-sharer to go to trial, was dinged $2 million by a federal jury in 2009 for sharing 24 MP3s on Kazaa, the now-defunct file-sharing service.
In the gay porn case, neither defendant appeared in court nor were they represented by lawyers. As a result, default judgements against the two were made days ago by two different Chicago federal judges who found the defendants liable for infringement based on watermarking technology that Flava Works uses to track its films. Flava Works applies a unique watermark to each film that is downloaded, which is associated with the customer who downloads it. Watermarks assigned to the two defendants were discovered copied thousands of times on the internet, Flava Works said.
Daliah Saper, a Chicago attorney representing other defendants in the litigation, said no IP addresses ever linked any of the defendants to the purloined torrents — just the unique watermarks, which she is challenging in court as unreliable.
Neither of the defendants could be reached for comment. Fisher did not answer phone calls made to what is believed to be his residence. Contact information for Brown could not immediately be determined.
Meanith Huon, Flava Works’ attorney, declined comment.