A Hong Kong citizen has been jailed for three months after sharing three Hollywood movies online over the BitTorrent network, according to reports.
Chan Nai-ming, 38, was sentenced by the Tuen Mun Magistrates Court on Monday. He was convicted on 24 October for distributing three Hollywood blockbusters — Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality — over the Internet.
Chan Nai-ming is thought to be the first person to be convicted of copyright infringement using the BitTorrent file-sharing network.
Customs officers arrested Nai-ming in January 2005. He pleaded not guilty to copyright infringement but was convicted after a four-day trial.
Bit Torrent is a popular protocol used to share large files over the Internet using peer-to-peer technology. The original application was written by programmer Bram Cohen and is open source.
The program allows its users to download fragments of a large file from many other users rather than getting the whole file from a single source. BitTorrent has increasingly grown into one of the most widely used means of providing large files for download, including some Linux distributions.
The popularity of file-sharing networks has sparked a clampdown from recording companies and movie studios which have sued thousands of peer-to-peer users for copyright infringement over the past few years. The US Supreme Court ruled in June 2005 that peer-to-peer services could be sued if they encourage users to share copyrighted material without permission.
Talkback
Man, so you can be convicted for distributing absolute crap, no matter how old it is? Sheesh, at least they could have convicted somebody who was sharing good movies.