Shanghai Daily reports:

FOUR employees of a Beijing Website company have been accused of publishing pornographic photos to attract mobile phone Internet users to their site and face up to life in prison, a Beijing-based newspaper reported today.

The four defendants, including two directors of Beijing Qingdian Wanwei Technology Company’s WAP service department, was charged by prosecutors for uploading 28 pornographic photos onto the company’s server. The firm received 253,335 clicks from mobile phone users from January 2007 to May 2007, Legal Daily said.

Wonderful what you can do on mobile phones these days. But success does have its price:

They had illegally spread obscene pictures online for profit and the consequence is “especially serious” as more than 250,000 people have seen the pictures, the Beijing Xicheng District People’s Court was told, the report said.

The punishment for spreading online obscene pictures is measured by the number of clicks, according to Chinese Criminal Law. If more than 250,000 people click the pictures, the consequence is categorized as “especially serious” and the jail term is fixed at 10 years to life.

The unfortunate staffers, who claim to have acted under orders from their employer and didn’t profit personally from the incident, have asked that the web server logs be checked to “re-evaluate” the number of hits. The court hasn’t reached a verdict.

I’m sure the logs (depending what the standards are for digital evidence in China) should allow them to wriggle below the 250,000 threshold. Between search engine spiders and enamored repeat viewers they should be able to knock a few thousand off the total.

This is the first time I’ve heard of a criminal punishment directly correlated to web site traffic. It brings a whole new perspective to click fraud.

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