The 38-year-old unemployed man was arrested in his Wan Chai residence after officers detected him uploading directions on downloading two movies over the weekend.

They were first alerted by their HK$100,000 Lineament Monitoring System on Friday when the copyright infringer logged in for a little over an hour to upload directions to a Bit Torrent "seeder file" required to reassemble file fragments from his and other computers containing the parts of the copyright- infringing work. But the man logged off after nearly two hours of uploading. When he went online again on Sunday, his location was revealed by his internet service provider after he finished uploading the final segments.

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The uploader was arrested Monday for contravening the Copyright Ordinance. Customs seized a computer and peripheral equipment worth about HK$10,000.

Customs copyright investigation divisional commander Kwan Yuk-kwan said the instructions were posted on a local forum, adding some 13,000 users had managed to download over 99 percent of the two movies.

Kwan said the copyright holders of the two movies - NYC Tornado Terror and Bridehood Revisited - would be contacted. He warned downloaders could face civil liability at the discretion of the copyright holder, while the file uploader faces a HK$50,000 fine and four years in prison.

Monday's case is the second detected through the Customs Lineament Monitoring System, which was implemented in 2007 to search, analyze and report any suspected infringement of intellectual property on local websites and forums.

The system's first arrest was a 27-year-old cashier who was caught September last year for uploading two movies and a TV drama.