Two American men were sentenced Tuesday in Shanghai to prison terms of up to 2 1/2 years for selling pirated DVDs on Internet sites like eBay in a rare success for joint U.S.-China efforts to enforce intellectual property laws.
The two Americans and two Chinese co-defendants were accused of using the Internet to sell more than 180,000 counterfeit DVDs to buyers in 25 countries, including about 20,000 discs to U.S. buyers. Prosecutors said they seized 119,000 pirated DVDs in raids last summer on a warehouse and the Shanghai apartment of American Randolph Hobson Guthrie.
