US BitTorrent user Kywan Fisher has been ordered to pay $1,500,000 in damages to adult entertainment company Flava Works for illegally sharing 10 of the company's movies. It's the largest award handed out in a US case to date.

The defendant was accused of ripping the films from Flava Works' online movie portal and subsequently distributing them on peer-to-peer sharing networks as torrent files. The judge in a federal court in Illinois awarded $150,000 per film shared.

Fisher was found guilty of infringing Flava's copyright based on the fact that each of the films distributed had a unique encrypted code that was specific to him. He was a subscriber to the Flava Works adult movie streaming site and, therefore, his actions could be traced back directly to his account.

The fact he was a paid subscriber also meant Flava had his full contact details in order to start legal proceedings against him.

"Plaintiff has proprietary software that assigns a unique encrypted code to each member of Plaintiff’s paid websites," said Flava's representative in court. "In this case, every time the Defendant downloads 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’,"

Kywan Fisher failed to appear in court to defend himself, which many believe to have been partly the reason for the maximum possible statutory damages.

Because it was revealed in court that the films were allegedly downloaded more than 3,449 times, Fisher will be paying Flava a whopping $435 per download.

At the present, it is not known if the Fisher plans to appeal.

Pic: Modified from (cc) helium273