Flava Works explained that they tracked the crime to Kywan Fisher thanks to their proprietary software. Movies downloaded from any of their paid membership porn sites had the encrypted user id of the user downloading the film hard coded in the actual movie file.
Breaking the copyright law brings damages calculated without the need to consider real-world harms. This is why in case of copyright infringement charges start from $750 per infringed work and can go up to $150000. The argument used to consider higher damages is how “willful” was the infringer when he broke the law. Kywan Fisher did not show up in court and the judge gave the maximum penalty. It is unclear why Judge John Lee opted for the maximum penalty.
The videos uploaded by Kywan Fisher were downloaded a total of 34449 times on various peer-to-peer networks. The penalty is rather harsh if you consider that Kywan Fisher needs to pay close to $435 (calculated by dividing the sentence by the total number of downloads) for each illegal download of the files he shared.
