China has closed a number of domestic porn and illegal websites in the latest crackdown on Internet porn and piracy, authorities said.

According to the national office of anti-porn and anti-piracy under the General Administration of Press and Publication, a number of piracy cases, in the provinces of Guangdong, Anhui and Hubei have resulted in arrests.

Anhui province in east China closed or deleted seven websites containing illegal content and 53 websites were closed that contained pornographic or violent online games.

Police in Hefei, capital of Anhui, uncovered a live sex website.

In Hubei province, central China, three Internet piracy rings were broken. Lu Xiaoliang and Chen Liang, have been accused of setting up a server to run the online game World of Legend and earned up to a million yuan (US$125,000) violating the rights of the game's official operator Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited.

In another case, Dong Yaping and his partners have been accused of operating the game Legend 3, violating the copyright of the games creator Guangzhou Optisp. The piracy ring made 260,000 yuan (US$32,500). Dong has been arrested.

The third case involves illegal movie downloading. Jiang Jinsong was fined 100,000 yuan and had five servers confiscated after his company was accused of charging visitors to his site for downloading thousands of movies without authorization from copyright owners.

In Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong province, 431,630 pirated books were confiscated, and seven people arrested. It's the first time that police have confiscated such a large number of pirated books in Shenzhen.

Investigation showed that the piracy ring had two warehouses of more than 2,400 square meters. Deng Xiaojun, head of the ring, said that the pirated books were mainly from Beijing and Hunan and were sold to provinces such as Zhejiang, Fujian, Hainan and Guangdong, forming a distribution network.

The national office for anti-porn and anti-piracy said that China is determined to protect copyright and will continue its efforts to fight against porn and piracy.

(Xinhua News Agency March 23, 2006)