China has closed a number of domestic porn and illegal websites
in the latest crackdown on Internet porn and piracy, authorities
said.
According to the national office of anti-porn and anti-piracy
under the General Administration of Press and Publication, a number
of piracy cases, in the provinces of Guangdong, Anhui and Hubei
have resulted in arrests.
Anhui province in east China closed or deleted seven websites
containing illegal content and 53 websites were closed that
contained pornographic or violent online games.
Police in Hefei, capital of Anhui, uncovered a live sex
website.
In Hubei province, central China, three Internet piracy rings
were broken. Lu Xiaoliang and Chen Liang, have been accused of
setting up a server to run the online game World of Legend and
earned up to a million yuan (US$125,000) violating the rights of
the game's official operator Shanda Interactive Entertainment
Limited.
In another case, Dong Yaping and his partners have been accused
of operating the game Legend 3, violating the copyright of the
games creator Guangzhou Optisp. The piracy ring made 260,000 yuan
(US$32,500). Dong has been arrested.
The third case involves illegal movie downloading. Jiang Jinsong
was fined 100,000 yuan and had five servers confiscated after his
company was accused of charging visitors to his site for
downloading thousands of movies without authorization from
copyright owners.
In Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong province, 431,630 pirated
books were confiscated, and seven people arrested. It's the first
time that police have confiscated such a large number of pirated
books in Shenzhen.
Investigation showed that the piracy ring had two warehouses of
more than 2,400 square meters. Deng Xiaojun, head of the ring, said
that the pirated books were mainly from Beijing and Hunan and were
sold to provinces such as Zhejiang, Fujian, Hainan and Guangdong,
forming a distribution network.
The national office for anti-porn and anti-piracy said that
China is determined to protect copyright and will continue its
efforts to fight against porn and piracy.
(Xinhua News Agency March 23, 2006)