Police bust group that pirated mystery game

A total of 39 suspects who allegedly pirated copies of jubensha, a popular scripted group murder mystery role-playing game, have been recently captured.

Three workshops where the pirated scripts were made and 15 sites used for storing or selling the game have also been shuttered, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, which lead the bust, said in a statement on its micro blog on Wednesday.

More than 80,000 boxes of the pirated scripts worth over 50 million yuan ($7.1 million) have been seized, the bureau said.

It was the first copyright infringement case concerning jubensha scripts in China, it added.

"The live action role-playing murder mystery game, or jubensha in Chinese, is an emerging business and also a new social media form that is very popular among youngsters," Zhuang Liqiang, spokesman of the bureau, told local Xinmin Evening News, a local news outlet.

"So we've attached importance to the development of the game and have paid close attention to relevant risks."

In July, a few jubensha products aroused police attention because they were sold at a price far below market on e-commerce platforms, the statement said.

For example, a popular box of pirated scripts with an official issue price of about 500 yuan was selling for just 50 yuan in some online shops, it said.

The bureau investigated the shops and discovered illegal copies.

Police quickly tracked down the suspects, who are accused of printing, packing, storing and selling the pirated products in Zhejiang province.

The public security bureau said that since May, two suspects surnamed Su and Lin had copied more than 300 jubensha scripts without permission from the copyright owners.

The two rented workshops in Zhejiang and hired several others to print the pirated editions and pack them into boxes for sale, it said.

The copies were bought by some online shoppers and game venue operators, even though they knew the scripts were pirated, it said.

Four principal suspects, including Su and Lin, remain in jail, while the others have been released on their own recognizance, it added.

Early this year, the jubensha business in Shanghai was required to submit documents — including a statement clarifying the copyright status of game scripts — to local authorities before they become available to the public, per a set of regulations released by the city's culture and tourism administration.

That made Shanghai the first city on the mainland to regulate live-action role-playing murder mystery games.