AFAIK most of those that have been sued have been those who /share/ copied material. I don't (think) anyone has ever been sued for downloading copyrighted mater

AFAIK most of those that have been sued have been those who /share/ copied material. I don't (think) anyone has ever been sued for downloading copyrighted material from a file host, but they have from bit-torrent, as when you DL from a .torrent file you are also sharing the file back out to other users. The activities described do break the copyright terms in the books, but as long as he didn't share them it's unlikely that anyone would go after him, and if they did it's unlikely that they would make such a high fine stick. The fine is supposed to cover the potential for lost earnings, so in this case he'd likely be looking at a fine of 2k or less. But I'm no lawyer!