The Copyright Claim Was Worth $114.85. The Other Claim Was Worth $75 Million.

A federal jury in Connecticut looked at five infringed works belonging to Post University and valued them at $114.85.

Then it looked at a different claim and valued that at $75,375,000.

Same defendant. Same stolen documents. Wildly different math. And the gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing a course creator will read this year.

What actually happened

On March 4, 2026, a Connecticut federal jury returned $75.3 million in damages against Learneo Inc., Course Hero's parent, after a nine-day trial that began on February 17 and covered direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement plus removal or alteration of copyright management information under the DMCA.

Post University's core argument: Learneo obtained school-owned materials such as tests, quizzes, assignments and course outlines, modified them to obscure the school's copyright marks, and sold them to customers who were mostly its own students. Learneo's defense was the familiar platform one, that users upload the documents, not employees. The jury sided with the school on every question asked.

Here's the split that matters. On the straight copyright infringement question, covering a collection of five works, the jury found infringement but awarded $114.85. The CMI findings brought the total to $75,375,114.85.

On the CMI questions the jury awarded maximum damages per work: 1,458 works with false CMI, 1,557 with removed or altered CMI, at $25,000 each. Statutory damages under the DMCA run from $2,500 to $25,000 per violation, and the jury went to the ceiling on all 3,015.

Post's chief regulatory officer and general counsel, Kimber Summers, said the verdict sends a message that "educational content cannot be taken, altered, and sold without permission."

CMI is the part you're ignoring

Copyright management information is the boring text you probably strip out of your worksheets to make them look cleaner. It's the title, the author name, the copyright owner, and the terms for use of the work, conveyed in connection with copies of that work. Section 1202 makes it unlawful to distribute false CMI with intent to induce or conceal infringement.

Two details creators consistently get wrong.

One: a copyright registration is not required for information to qualify as CMI or to be protected under Section 1202 — registration is a prerequisite for an infringement action, but CMI claims are separate and need no such registration.

Two: it isn't automatic. The provision targets knowing and intentional misuse of CMI to induce, enable, facilitate or conceal infringement. Sloppy re-uploading by a student is not the same as a business systematically rebranding your file.

Before your next launch

Put the work's title, your name as author, the copyright owner and your usage terms directly on every downloadable — footer of every page of the PDF, not just the cover, plus the document metadata. That footer is the thing a scraper has to remove, and removal is the claim.

Two cautions. Learneo denies the allegations and has said it intends to appeal. And as Plagiarism Today noted, there are serious limits on applying this verdict to other sites; copyright is powerful here but not a silver bullet.

Still, the price list is now public. A stripped footer is worth up to $25,000. A missing footer is worth nothing.