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Online piracy campaign a success
By Liu Li (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-07 06:20
In an effort to curb online piracy, 18 criminal offence cases have been
handed over to police for investigation, sources with the National Copyright
Administration of China said yesterday.
"Most of the involved suspects were arrested by local public security
departments," Zhao Xiuling, director of the copyright department of the
administration told China Daily.
The 18 cases are among 172 instances of web piracy broken up since last
September by a series of Chinese departments including the administration, the
Ministry of Public Security, the Publicity Department of the CPC Central
Committee and the Ministry of Information Industry.
The campaign uncovered a website created by Lu Xiaoliang and Chen Liang in Central China's Hubei Province that provided illegal services on a game developed by Shanda Interactive Entertainment, China's biggest online game operator.
Lu and Chen sold the game facilities from the end of 2003 without permission
from the Shanghai-based company.
According to Zhao, they earned nearly 1 million yuan (US$123,000) through a
total of 80 servers.
The Jingzhou Municipal Bureau of Copyright in Hubei Province transferred the
case to local police in December last year to ascertain the suspects'
punishment.
At least another six similar cases were found that deal with selling illegal
services for online games.
A movie website, www.116.com, was also fined 90,000 yuan (US$11,100) and was
ordered to stop providing download services for some US movies without
permission.
The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Copyright made the decision, sources said.
Altogether, 76 websites were closed down in the sweep of online piracy across
the country, according to sources within the administration.
Most are websites that provide download services to music products, movies
and software, according to Zhao.
Meanwhile, 137 websites were ordered to remove any illegal content, and 29
websites were fined a total of 789,000 yuan (US$97,000).
However, some suspects are still at large.
For example, Huang Fei, owner of a website that illegally provided download
services for design software, is wanted by police.
Huang made 40,000 yuan (US$4,900) through his website, sources said.
(China Daily 02/07/2006 page2)
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