Chinese officials have been busy fining and jailing copyright pirates and pornographers in the latest crackdown on intellectual property theft and vice.

One porn peddler was put behind bars for a hefty 12 years in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, according to China's national antipornography and antipiracy office, while another seller of porn DVDs was jailed for five years and fined $1,250.

In the northern province of Henan, a pirate publisher was jailed for 10 months for illegally printing a Chinese dictionary and fined $2,500.

Two pirates in the southeastern city of Xiamen were jailed for a year, and in the eastern city of Qingdao, a person was given two years in prison and fined $375 for selling pirated DVDs and computer software.

Officials also smashed two production lines for pirating DVDs in Nanchang, capital of east China's Jiangxi Province, confiscating over 100,000 discs and detaining 17 people.

Since the piracy crackdown in July, authorities have broken up hundreds of illegal DVD production lines, the office said.

Separately, the government plans to impose restrictions on the reporting of "vicious crimes" on radio and TV to "create a healthy environment for the country's youth."

"We must not let improper crime reporting harm young minds," Zhang Haitao, vice director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, told local media.

Sarft continues to exert tighter control over China's screens after it banned TV serials that were said to have gone into too much detail in portraying crimes.

Reporting on crimes such as kidnapping and arson will be subject to strict controls and detailed reports of detective work will be banned, as will detailed descriptions and analysis of criminal methods and motives.

China has nine crime reporting channels and more than 200 crime skeins.