14 DAY TRIAL // A man from Poughkeepsie, New York, has been ordered to pay $7,000 (€5,500) to John Wiley & Sons after a court found him guilty of copyright and trademark infringement for sharing the “WordPress All-in-One For Dummies” book on a BitTorrent website.
In a first ever decision, Judge William Pauley ordered Robert Carpenter to pay $5,000 (€4,000) in “statutory damages” for copyright infringement and another $2,000 (€1,600) for counterfeiting, TorrentFreak reports.
John Wiley & Sons has started filing court complaints against Internet users who are caught downloading and sharing their books and so far they haven’t encountered any problems.
Since the fall of 2011, most Internet service providers complied with court orders and gave the company the identities of account holders whose IPs have been identified as downloading copyrighted content.
As in many similar cases, the firm gives defendants the opportunity to handle the cases through a private settlement, which is usually around $3,000 (€2,400) for each individual.
However, this particular case is different from all the others because the judge ordered a default judgment and appointed Carpenter as being guilty of counterfeiting, which is usually attributed to crimes in which people sell fake items and advertise them as being genuine.
It’s believed that Wiley & Sons has made over $1 million (€790,000) from private settlements after filing court actions against individuals who have shared digital copies of books from the “for Dummies” series.
On the other hand, not all the rights holders that seek settlements have received good news in the past month. In June, a court quashed subpoenas and closed a case filed by Prenda Law against Comcast customers suspected of downloading materials from BitTorrent websites.