Suzhou (China), Aug 21 (Xinhua) China has sentenced a man to three and a half years in jail for software piracy in the country's biggest copyright infringement case, a media report said Friday.

Hong Lei, maker of China's most popular pirated edition of Windows XP, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail Thursday in the eastern Suzhou City, the news portal subaonet.com reported.

Hong was also fined one million yuan ($146,400) by the People's Court in Suzhou.

To create the pirated Tomato Garden Windows XP, Hong disabled the authentication and certification process.

Hong and his partners offered free downloads of the Windows XP Tomato Garden Edition to at least 10 million users and made profits from advertisements.

Hong's partner, Sun Xianzhong, received the same sentence. Another two people were sentenced to two years in prison and each was fined 100,000 yuan.

The Chengdu Gongruan Networking Technology Co. Ltd., which ran the download website, had its income of 2.92 million yuan confiscated and was fined 8.