Following pressure from Hollywood, more than a dozen people behind famous Chinese piracy and subtitling site YYeTs.com were arrested in February. After a legal process in China, the founder of the platform – also known as Renren Yingshi – has been sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a US$235,000 fine. The site itself remains online although accessing content is hit and miss.

While China needs little prompting to shut down or block any websites that don’t fit a locally-approved profile, sometimes it needs encouragement from overseas.

In 2014 the MPAA highlighted the activities of China-based YYeTs.com, a site known locally as Renren Yingshi. The platform was described as the most popular download site for copyrighted content in China, providing links in various formats, including for the popular Xunlei and BitTorrent clients. By this time the site had already been in operation for more than a decade.

Hollywood’s problem was that the platform offered Chinese subtitles for Western content, something that helped boost infringement of US-made movies and TV shows. That also presented a problem for the Chinese government which tends to control what content is made available to local audiences, oftentimes with crucial edits to remove references and material deemed to be offensive.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

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