Updated March 12, 2012 at 3:32EDT

Los Angeles. On March 9, 2012, in a judgment given by Federal District Court Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court of Central California, Cinesamples LLC, a California corporation was awarded $379,050 in damages and lost profits plus attorney fees against Pablo Vargas Casas, a resident of Chile, on three causes of action: violation of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), copyright infringement, and breach of contract.

According to the Court’s civil minutes, in June 2011, Mr. Casas, “used Internet discussion boards to organize a group purchase of a single license for the CineBrass software library.” On June 15, 2011, Mr. Casas purchased for download the CineBrass library for $399 U.S.D. at which point Mr. Vargas agreed to a software licensing agreement.

After downloading the CineBrass program, Mr. Casas altered the software housing the CineBrass sample library, the Native Instruments Kontakt player, which then permitted unlicensed versions of the software to be distributed to multiple users. Mr. Casas then uploaded both the “cracked” Kontakt software and the complete CineBrass library to several illicit file sharing web sites, resulting in approximately 950 potential purchasers and unlicensed users downloading the library.

Because Mr. Casas did not appear in court to defend himself, Judge Gee awarded Cinesamples with a default judgment based on the list price of the program times the number of downloads. Court minutes did not state which Internet discussion boards Mr. Vargas posted to.

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