Federal judge William Pauley has ruled that one reader should pay John Wiley and Sons $7,000 in statutory damages for pirating a copy of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies on a torrent file-sharing site.
According to the court filing, the fine includes $5,000 for copyright infringement and $2,000 for the “counterfeiting of Wiley’s Trademarks.” The publisher had sued a number of BitTorrent users for pirating books, and the plaintiff was the last defendant in the legal action.
TorrentFreak has more details: “This means that aside from the $7,000 in damages from Carpenter, the book publisher may have raked in more than a million dollars though private settlements. Private settlements are usually around $3,000 per person, which quickly adds up with hundreds of defendants.”