Hong Kong  - The operator of a Hong Kong website that carried advertisements for brothels was Friday beginning an 18-month jail term after being convicted of living off prostitutes' earnings.

The ruling, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, has alarmed some legislators and welfare groups who say it will open a legal minefield for anyone who has business dealings with prostitutes.

At a court hearing Thursday, Chan Yuk-bun, 48, was jailed for conspiring to live off the earnings of prostitution by carrying brothel adverts on his website from 2003 to 2006.

He charged 77 US dollars a month for advertisements which included the prostitutes' names, ages, addresses and price lists of how much they charged for sex.

Hundreds of prostitutes advertised on the website which made profits of up to 13,000 US dollars a month, Hong Kong's District Court was told.

Six other people who worked on the website including a designer and a programmer were also convicted of the same charge and sentenced to 180 hours' community service with fines of 2,564 US dollars each.

Judge David Dufton said Chan's website "encouraged prostitution on a large scale" and had no measures to prevent access by the under-aged.

The conviction has been criticized in Hong Kong where thousands of women, many of them from neighbouring mainland China, work in brothels.

One legislator said the use of the law to prosecute a website meant in theory that a builder who knowingly did work on a prostitute's flat could also be committing an offence.

In the UK, the law of living off a prostitute's earnings has been amended to restrict it to those who control women for their own gain, but no such amendment to the law has been made in Hong Kong.

A welfare group for prostitutes, quoted in Friday's South China Morning Post, questioned whether the ruling meant children of prostitutes could be charged with living off their mothers' earnings. (dpa)