p2pnet - rss feed: Winny author Kaneko fined
p2pnet.net News:- Winny creator Isamu Kaneko is another p2p innovator targeted by the members of the Big Four Organized Music cartel in their quest to gain complete corporate control of online usic distribution and pricing.
Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) wanted Kaneko thrown into jail but instead, it looks as though they’ll have to settle for a 1.5 million yen (today, about $12,743) fine as the price for publicizing Winny to an extent Kaneko himself could never have done.
“It is the first case in which a program’s creator has been charged over the unlawful acts of its users,” says The Japan Times.
“Prosecutors [read the Big Four] had sought one year in prison for former University of Tokyo researcher Isamu Kaneko, 36, claiming he developed the program intending to destroy the copyright system and promoted unlawful copying of protected content.”
“The defendant made Winny public on his home page, assisting users (of the software) to easily violate copyrights,” the story has presiding Judge Makoto Himuro of the Kyoto District Court stating, calling the acts “selfish and irresponsible.”
But, adds The Japan Times, Himuro said Kaneko hadn’t intended to “spread violations” and, “acknowledged Winny’s legitimate usefulness as ‘meaningful’.”
Kaneko’s lawyers have appealed.
Check out a version here.
(Thanks again, Michael L)
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
thrown into jail - Winny author should be jailed, July 3, 2006
Winny - ‘New’ Winny p2p file sharing, August 31, 2006
The Japan Times - Winny creator guilty in copyright violations, December 14, 2006
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December 14th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
In Japan, getting caught with even a pinch of marijauna can get you some serious jail time. Their laws are much much more restrictive in other areas too.
As for freedom of speech or anything like that in Japan, forget it.
And if someone wants to make an app to ‘destroy the copyright system’, believe me, it could easily be done. Combine any decentralized network with TOR-like technology and there you go. You would lose half your bandwidth to proxying, but you would be 100% absolutely anonymous.