China jails website founder in IPR violation crackdown

BEIJING - A man has been sentenced to three years in prison with a three-year reprieve for running a paid website that offered unlicensed downloads of copyrighted materials, authorities announced Tuesday.

The man, identified as Tang, set up an "education oriented" website in June 2012, and offered a substantial amount of copyrighted educational material, including videos, TV episodes and films for paid members to download, according to a statement released Tuesday by the National Copyright Administration (NCA).

The site attracted more than 1,600 members and clocked over 650,000 downloads, generating profits of 100,000 yuan (16,155 U.S. dollars) for Tang, it said.

In addition to jail time, a court in the city of Harbin in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province also fined Tang 60,000 yuan for his IPR violations this year.

The case was among 12 publicized Tuesday as part of the results of a campaign against online copyright infringement. According to the NCA, the "Sword Net 2014" campaign will continue to the end of 2014 despite its initial November deadline.

In another case involving the popular subtitle website (www.shooter.cn), the NCA revealed that investigation into the site's copyright violation issue was based on complaints filed by The Motion Picture Association of America.

Shanghai-based Sagittarius Technology Co. Ltd., which ran the website, was found to have sold about 100 portable hard drives containing copyrighted films and music files without permission via the site from May 2013. The site also offered subtitles for film and TV titles in various languages for download without licenses.

The website was shut down on Nov. 23, and the NCA said Shanghai's cultural market law enforcement authorities would announce administrative punishment on the company in the near future.