I worry that an anti-P2P culture may be on the rise in Japan, or at least among Japanese law enforcement and legal communities.

The coder of WinNY, once the most popular file-sharing app in Japan, got tried and convicted of thoughtcrime, merely for making the program. (See WinNY’s Wikipedia article.) This implies that WinNY, and similar anonymizing P2P software, is illegal software under Japanese law.

So, this story raises the question: Did the cop get fired for using P2P inappropriately, or did he get fired for using P2P -at all-?

The reason I say this, is that this is not the first occurrence of this sort of thing, here in Japan.

The thing that most of the articles miss, is the fact that this police man, as well of many of the other dingbats that have ended up leaking sensitive information on the Internet, did so by not only using the Winny P2P application, but by installing it on a departmental notebook PC, and taking the notebook PC home and accessing the net from a local carrier(of course this is strictly prohibited by the both the Japanese police and the self defence forces, but it happened none the less).

This enhanced by the fact that most of the illegal breaches came as a result of a virus propagated over the Winny P2P network, which takes a screen shot of your desktop, bundles the files in the My documents folder, scan the HDD for images, and then uploads them to the Winny network and or several famous uploading sites.

The virus is often propagated through Adult oriented files, as well as popular movie screeners, which means that there is a high possibility that these people downloaded “illegal” files in the first place to get infected.

No matter how you explain it, this is a result of stupidity and the police and military, here in Japan… because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you should use AV software, and not hook computer with sensitive information, to a public network.

The sad thing about this, is that this embarrassment to the police and military, has cause them to go on a personal vendetta against P2P applications in general, trying to shift the blame of their ignorance to the P2P applications, and gaining a strong ally in the Entertainment cartails and software businesses, here in Japan.

This has even fueled speculation, that the Virus was developed by the Entertainment cartail to gain political support.

Doesn’t this tactic remind you of a similar tactic happening in other parts of the world?

Just my two cents