Hong Kong's first copyright infringement case involving BitTorrent (BT) technology began on October 12.

Gu Huo Tian Huang, the online alias of a man whose real name has not been disclosed, is accused of illegally spreading movies online. He might face up to four years' imprisonment and a CNY50000 fine.

In January 2005, the 38-year old unemployed "Gu Huo Tian Huang" was found to have illegally uploaded the films Daredevil, Miss Congeniality and Red Planet without permission from the respective copyright owners.

He denies that he uploaded the movies for commercial purposes.

The court's decision should arrive in the coming weeks.

BitTorrent is the protocol and the name of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool that debuted in 2002. The reference implementation is written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License, as of version 4.0. The name "BitTorrent" refers to the distribution protocol, the original client application, and the .torrent file type.