A court at Shanghai convicted the scion of a prominent Upper East Side family yesterday of selling tens of thousands of pirated DVDs in China.

A 38-year-old described by old friends as brilliant but troubled, Randolph Hobson Guthrie III, an heir to the fortune of steel magnate Henry Phipps, was sentenced to serve two-and-a-half years at Quingpu prison. Counting the nine months he has already served, he is to be deported to New York January 1, 2007.

Guthrie was convicted along with another American, Abram Cody Thrush, 30, and two Chinese nationals in a case that a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, Dean Boyd, said was the first joint operation by the American and Chinese governments against intellectual property theft.

The Motion Picture Association of America applauded the convictions.

Friends said Guthrie, who allegedly grossed $840,000 from the DVD sales, became a scapegoat for the Chinese and American governments to appease the motion-picture industry’s outcry over pirating. The association estimates that the American motion-picture industry loses more than $3.5 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue to piracy.

“If they want to find someone, why don’t they just go to Chinatown?” one friend of Guthrie’s, Kim Freehill, said. “Randy was just a pawn in an international spy game. His social status brought him down.”

Guthrie’s parents expressed relief yesterday that a resolution was in sight for the ordeal, in which their son could have been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

“Randy has been in prison in Shanghai for over nine months, without the right of family visitation or even written contact, and now that he has been sentenced, we are very much looking forward to being able to see him,” a family friend, John O’Keefe, said in a statement prepared by the family.

As Randy Guthrie was growing up, his father, Randolph Jr., a Harvard and Princeton alumnus, was a prominent plastic surgeon, and his mother, Beatrice, a descendant of Henry Phipps, was active on the charity-ball circuit. The family is in the New York Social Register.

Guthrie attended the Buckley School near his home. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Tufts University and went on to earn a master’s in business administration from Columbia.

He had always been regarded as a towering intellect, who constantly offended people by saying the first thing that came to mind. His parents said their eldest son suffers from a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, a neural disorder characterized by poor social skills. Guthrie’s parents said he had been in counseling since he was 5.

His few friends said Guthrie’s insults made him an outcast from his parents’ social world.

One friend, Allan Block, who is chairman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, met Guthrie at a black-tie party New Year’s Eve in 1993, where Guthrie was introduced as “Randy, he insults everybody.”

But Guthrie’s intellect redeemed him in Mr. Block’s eyes.

“This guy should have been able to rule the world,” Mr. Block said. “On the other hand, he never held a job in the time I knew him.”

For the most part, Guthrie, a slim 6-footer, lived at his parents’ homes at Palm Beach and New York.

Still, he “never seemed to have a lot of money,” another friend, Mitchell Cantor, an attorney at the Upper East Side, said.

Friends said his share of the family’s fortune would not come to him if he remained in New York. His parents, speaking through a family friend, said there were no such stipulations on his trust.

In particular, friends remember the shocking things Guthrie would say to women, seemingly without understanding how hurtful he was being.

“He was a bit of a kook,” another friend, Nora Lawlor, said. “If he thought you were badly dressed, he’d say you really dress bad. If someone was ugly, he’d say I think you’d better get a nose job.”

Some of Guthrie’s friends said his problems and his failures drove him in 1995 to move to China, where he thrived.

Soon after he settled at Shanghai, the once-penniless Guthrie bought a penthouse apartment. His Columbia MBA yielded no jobs, though, and by time of Mr. Block’s visit to Guthrie in May 2002, his selling of pirated DVDs was apparently in full swing.

“I said, ‘Randy, you are a guest in a foreign country, you must follow the law to the letter,'” Mr. Block recalled. “He insisted everybody was corrupt and he was just doing what everybody else was doing.”

His outspokenness may have been his ruin. Guthrie sold more than 180,000 pirated DVDs to people in 25 countries through e-Bay and a Russian Web site, www.threedollardvd.com, where he boasted to potential customers of the quality of the discs.

The convictions of Guthrie and his accomplices are the culmination of a three-year investigation that began with the seizure of fake DVDs in a flea market at Gulfport, Miss. Eventually, the investigation included American immigration and customs agents in three states as well as attaches in China, who tipped off officials there to Guthrie’s activities. Early last July 2, police raided his penthouse apartment, arrested Guthrie, and seized 210,000 DVDs. Guthrie has the right to appeal yesterday’s verdict.

Though China had become Guthrie’s home, his friends said his parents never visited. Yesterday, Mr. O’Keefe said Guthrie’s parents had applied for Chinese visas and plan to visit their son as soon as he is resettled at Quingpu prison, where family visits are allowed.