HONG KONG, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Hong Kong's highest court Friday dismissed an appeal by a man who had been jailed in what was the world's first prison sentence for distributing movie files over the popular online BitTorrent (BT) Internet network.

    The Court of Final Appeal dismissed the appeal of Chan Nai-ming,who had been sentenced to three months in jail for uploading infringing movies to the Internet by using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing program.

    The Court of Final Appeal ruled that Chan, by using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing program to upload infringing movies to the Internet for other Internet users to download, had plainly succeeded in distributing the infringing copies. The court believed Chan was correctly convicted of the offenses under the Copyright Ordinance, and dismissed the appeal.

    The Assistant Commissioner of Customs and Excise Tam Yiu-keung said Hong Kong Customs welcomed the ruling of the Court of Final Appeal.

    The judgment confirmed that uploading of infringing copies of copyright works to the Internet by using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing program for downloading by other Internet users was a criminal offense under the Copyright Ordinance, he added.

    "The ruling will generate a strong deterrent effect on Internet piracy activities," Tam said.

    Chan was jailed for three months last November for uploading three Hollywood movies onto the Web via the BitTorrent (BT) peer-to-peer network.

    He was charged in April last year of uploading the movies "Daredevil," "Miss Congeniality" and "Red Planet" without a license.