By Song Shengxia

The fate of the country's multimedia file-sharing portals are in serious doubt following the suspension of music and video downloading services at a popular website over the weekend.

Access to music channels and movie clips at verycd.com have either been blocked or automatically diverted to other Web pages since Saturday.

Refuting earlier reports that the website would be shut down or turned into a social networking service, Huang Yimeng, CEO of VeryCD, told the Global Times Sunday that the suspension was aimed at avoiding copyright disputes.

"The regulations are getting stricter and we're not able to legally provide a similar amount of content as before. That's why we have to change our content offering," Huang said, admitting that the website was not totally prepared for such a change. 

Huang said the website's user experience has now been compromised, and some are demanding the return of downloading services.

"We hope that there is a transition for such a change so as to minimize the impact on our users," he said, refusing to comment on where the pressure came from to bring about such an abrupt change. 

VeryCD is not the only site facing an uncertain future. 

Downloading functions on subpig.com and uubird.com, two other similar peer-to-peer file-sharing websites, appeared to be disabled last night.

According to incomplete statistics, more than 400 peer-to-peer file-sharing websites including btchina.net, China's top media file-sharing website,  have been shut down during the last two years.

The peer-to-peer downloads themselves are called bit torrents, which allow users to download files of all sizes from other users, and to upload content to other users' computers.

Such websites are generally funded by selling placed advertisements and are popular among young Web users.

Zhou Yang, 24, a college student in Beijing, told the Global Times that her hobby of watching TV dramas during the winter holiday had been ruined by the shutting down of downloading services.

"I can't accept that the service is off all of a sudden. Some of the Japanese TV dramas I'm downloading have just stopped. Although I can still watch some of them online, it's not that convenient."

Zhou said she knew it was wrong to violate copyrights, but it was too expensive for her to pay for authorized copies, adding that even if she was willing to pay, some dramas are unobtainable on the market.

The latest move came after VeryCD, which has been beset by copyright disputes, was sued in May for the unlicensed broadcast of last year's martial arts box office hit Ip Man 2.

It also came on the heels of a recent campaign targeting the spread of unlicensed online content.

Early this month, the country's Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security jointly issued regulations specifying that those spreading other artists' works without authorization will be subject to a criminal penalty of between three and seven years in prison if the actual click rate on the work reaches 50,000 hits. 

In December, the Ministry of Culture also issued a notice announcing the start of a crackdown on unlicensed online music websites.

The move prompted speculation over whether the campaign would be expanded to other larger online video-download and music-download websites such as baidu.com, a leading music search and sharing website in China, which has recently been riddled with copyright issues.

On Thursday, 27 singers sent a lawyer's letter to Baidu, claiming 6.85 million yuan ($1.04 million) from the search engine for music copyright infringement.  

Ren Hucheng, a Beijing-based lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights, told the Global Times that the move to shut down the service could be seen as a sign of progress in the fight against piracy.

"The website is reacting to pressure from the law and governments because engaging in copyright disputes is risky and costly, and it also reflects the conflict between public convenience and copyright protection," he said.

However, Ren noted that shutting down the service is not a solution in the long term. "Online copyright violations stem from the invention of computer technology, which, on the positive side, brings convenience to the public.

"People are used to enjoying free services, and supervising this mass of information online is too hard, both economically and technically, for the service provider.

"So we can only solve the problem by improving technology that makes copyright information more detailed and protects rights at a low cost," he said.

Liu Linlin contributed to this story