Life In Prison For Porn

Wow, better not run a pron site if you live in china. Reuters has a news story about the founder of China’s biggest pornography Web site getting life imprisonment.

A Chinese court sentenced the founder of the country’s largest pornography Web site to life imprisonment on Wednesday and jailed another eight of the site’s organizers, state media reported

The Taiyuan Intermediate People’s Court handed down the sentence to Chen Hui, 28, and ordered the confiscation of 100,000 yuan ($12,500), Xinhua news agency said. The other eight were jailed for terms ranging from 13 months to 10 years.

Chen started “Pornographic Summer” in 2004 and went out to start three more porn sites. Like most porn sites, Chen made money by charging registration fees. His sites had 600,000 members who paid $25 to $33 to see the dirty stuff. The court was able to confiscation only $12,500 from Chen so it looks like he did a good job hiding his money, not that it will do him much good now.

China has an army of cyber police who patrol the Internet, but their targets are more often politically sensitive websites. I guess they’ve taken care of most of those and are now going after the porn sites.

The Internet looks very different when viewed from China. For example, a Google USA image search for the term “tianamen” produced these images. However, enter the same search term in Google China and you’ll get these nice vacation pictures.