BEIJING, Aug. 25 -- Fifteen people in Beijing were given prison terms ranging from eight months to five years on Tuesday for selling pirated software on Alibaba's softwaremarketplace and via the search engine Baidu.

The 15 people were involved in nine cases. They were also ordered to pay fines ranging from 20,000 yuan (3,100 U.S. dollars) to 1.2 million yuan, according to a statement by Haidian District People's Court.

All defendants were found guilty of selling encryption passwords to unlock authentic versions of Glodon construction project management software between March 2012 and July 2014, it said.

The copied software was being sold for about 1 percent of the retail price. All together, they earned 4.1 million yuan.

The court ruled that the defendants had collected earnings without the permission of the software developer, thus, had violated copyright.