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BEIJING - China sentenced a man to life in jail on Thursday for running what state media called the country's biggest ever pirate film disc smuggling ring.

A court in southern Guangxi region convicted Lin Yuehua and 11 gang members of buying five production units to make DVDs and VCDs, setting them up in a foreign country and smuggling over 30 million bootleg discs into China from 2002 to 2005, the Xinhua news agency reported.

A pirated DVD version of 'The Da Vinci Code' movie is displayed for sale along a sidewalk in Beijing in this May 22, 2006 file photo. China sentenced a man to life in jail on Thursday for running what state media called the country's biggest ever pirate film disc smuggling ring. [Reuters]

Lin's pirate smuggling business was the "largest one which has been so far uncovered in China," Xinhua said. The bootleg discs were worth about 188 million yuan ($23.9 million), the court said, according to Xinhua.

Lin's accomplices received jail sentences of two to 15 years.

The report did not name the foreign country where Lin based his bootlegging. The Guangxi region borders on Vietnam.

The court verdict came at a time when the United States and European Union are pressuring China to crack down on pirate copiers of films, music, software and other kind of intellectual property.

US copyright industry companies claim bootleggers cost them US$2.6 billion in sales in China last year. But on Chinese streets, pirate DVDs can cost as little as US$1, much cheaper than legitimate copies sold in wealthy countries.

Washington has left open the door to taking China to the World Trade Organisation, the Geneva-based world trade watchdog, to demand stricter criminal prosecution of counterfeiters.

Much of China's smuggled trade in counterfeits is out of the country rather than into it.

In 2005, United States customs made 8,000 seizures of pirated goods valued at US$93 million, and this year customs had made more than 14,000 seizures valued at over $156 million, and China was by far the largest source of the fakes, US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez said in Beijing last week.

Brussels said earlier in the month that faked goods cost the European Union about 500 billion euros (US$644 billion) a year, and two thirds of fakes seized coming into Europe were from China.