China Authorities Threaten BitTorrent Sites with Prison Time

[nsane.forums]

Country's Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security jointly announce that anybody guilty of illegally distributing copyrighted material that reaches 50,000 hits will face between 3 and 7 years in prison.

Chinese authorities are stepping up their anti-P2P efforts with news of a joint declaration made by the country's Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security earlier this month that anybody caught sharing copyrighted material without authorization will face criminal penalties of between 3 and 7 years in prison.

The threshold for the penalty is a mere 50,000 hits, a drop in the bucket in a country with a population of over 1.3bln.

The new penalty has already led many P2P site operators to rethink how and what content is shared.

"The regulations are getting stricter and we're not able to legally provide a similar amount of content as before," Huang Yimeng, CEO of VeryCD.com, told the Global Times. "That's why we have to change our content offering,"

Subpig.com and Uubird.com have also removed their downloading features.

VeryCD also faces a copyright infringement lawsuit for having illegally distributed the movie Ip Man 2.

The problem with the crackdown is made evident by the comments of a BitTorrent user, Zhou Yang, who points out that some of the TV shows she downloads just aren't legally available.

It's a common refrain for many BitTorrent users who are affected by regional distribution policies that dictate when and what content is made available.

In Australia, for example, new episodes of The Office lag far behind their US release dates, forcing people to seek out erstwhile illegal alternatives to make up for a gap in the marketplace.

Online distribution affords a level of convenience that consumers want and yet, many copyright holders refuse to allow. As long as this happens people will seek out the content on BitTorrent and via other P2P programs and services.

View: Original Article