Guilty ruling against Winny developer overturned
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Bad news in Japan for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music
Osaka’s High Court has overturned a lower court ruling convicting Winny developer Isamu Kaneko (right) of “assisting violations of the Copyright Law,” says the Mainichy Daily News.
Winny gained world attention lin 2003 because the first people Big Music managed to have arrested in Japan “on suspicion of violating copyright laws” were using it.
But, with an anonymous file-sharing feature, it was developed by Kaneko primarily as a research tool.
Now, “Isamu Kaneko, 39, a former research assistant at the University of Tokyo, was declared not guilty, and will not be required to pay a 1.5 million yen fine levied by a December 2006 Kyoto District Court ruling,” says the story, going on:
” ‘Merely being aware of the possibility that the software could be abused does not constitute a crime of aiding violations of the law, and the court cannot accept that the defendant supplied the software solely to be used for copyright violations,’ Presiding Judge Masazo Ogura said.”
Adds Mainichy Daily News:
“The appeal ruling sided with the defense, saying: ‘Anonymity is not something to be looked on as illegal, and it is not something that applies specifically to copyright violations. The technical value of the software is neutral’.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Mainichy Daily News – High court overturns guilty ruling against developer of file-sharing software Winny, October 8, 2009
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October 10th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Finnaly!
By the way is Winny is still working good right now and a significant number of people are using it. And the speed is decent.
When one of these decentralized thing goes online that’s it. You can not bring it down. Even killing internet is not going to do it because there is also few new wifi p2p internet network software ready to bloom. The software are there and some people are already using them.
All is needed is a computer with a wifi card. No ISP. A network can be formed using neighboring computers in which each computer act as a server and a client. In theory such a network could expend world wide.
October 10th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
ow, “Isamu Kaneko, 39, a former research assistant at the University of Tokyo, was declared not guilty.
Will he get back is position as a research assistant?
October 10th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
This is the old src for Winny, its not hot shakes but it did what it said on the can, most users have moved on to “Share” and the newer “perfect dark”
http://www.b-geeks.com/index.shtml
Still nice to see common sense take hold here and 47 has had his name cleared after all this time, as with bit torrent there is no liability in creating a protocol or a demo networking application regardless of what the users do with it and only the most ignorant luddites would proclaim any different.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:59 am
Now that he’s been cleared of all charges of criminal copyright infringement, does this mean that he is now free to continue development of Winny?
October 11th, 2009 at 2:22 am
There’s a version of WinNY in English on http://winnyenglish.blogspot.com/ I really, really hope that Mr Kaneko will resume the development of his application. Just imagine: new version of WinNY, open source, with many contributors.