BT Paradise Operator Jailed for Three Years in China

• BT Paradise operator Yuan Moumou has been declared guilty of copyright infringement by a court in China.
• Moumou will be facing three years of prison for sharing pirated content and generating ad revenue on his website.
• BT Paradise had generated over 1.4 million yuan and offered links to over 10,870 TV shows and movies.

BT Paradise was once the biggest torrent website in China, and operator Yuan Moumou was arrested in September 2016. Moumou was under trial for over two years before the Huai'an Intermediate People's Court of Jiangsu Province declared him guilty and handed down a three-year imprisonment sentence.

Unlike websites like The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG almost all of BT Paradise’s traffic came from China. Asian torrent websites like BT Paradise remain under the radar due to the use of local languages, making them unusable for nearly everyone in Europe and North America.

The sentence against Moumou was passed down on January 2, 2019. The investigations against the BT Paradise operator began in 2016 after reports were submitted to local authorities. The operator was found guilty of not only operating the torrent website but also of generating revenues through advertisements on the website, leading to an even harsher punishment.

In addition to the imprisonment, the BT Paradise operator will also need to pay a fine of 800,000 yuan which translates to about US$116,000. The website is not Moumou’s first torrent portal, he was using BTtiantang.com for piracy, but it did not gain much traction. Despite BT Paradise’s eventual success, there were not too many takedown notices filed even though big media companies being aware of the website’s impact in China and surrounding countries.

Piracy activity is being strictly dealt with globally with various content creators and industry groups actively filing copyright takedowns. Pirate IPTV box sellers, torrent websites and Kodi add-ons are the biggest targets for the industry as they generate the most downloads compared to smaller forums or social media groups.

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