Owners of movie download site sentenced
May 26, 2014 Category IPR protection, Weekly
Zhou Zhiquan, President of Beijing Xintian Yinping Technology Co that operated the website siluhd.com, which offered movies and TV downloads for profit without the permission of copyright holders, was sentenced five years in jail and fined CNY1 million. Six other defendants were given jail sentences ranging from one to three years. It is considered China’s largest online copyright infringement case. The company had seven managers and 140 website administrators to maintain the service. Between January 2009 and April 2013, the seven put movies, TV shows and music on the website. Visitors could not directly find the download area on the site’s homepage, which mainly provided film-related news and introduced some HD audiovisual products that were legal and clean. But a link to bbs.siluhd that required registration and an invitation code led to hdstar.org, the domain actually offering pirated films and TV programs for download. The website offered some 19,000 unlicensed movies and TV series, more than 3,300 music albums and nearly 210 game software packages. It charged each member CNY50 a month for unlimited downloads. By last year, the website had more than 1.4 million registered members.
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