Slashdot Mirror
Winny P2P Software Creator Arrested
News for nerds writes "The author of Winny, the Japanese P2P software with encrypted networking capability, similar to Freenet, has been today officially arrested for abetment of copyright violation, after the raid in the last December. He started its development in May 2002 and occasionally appeared on the web forum 2ch with his anonymous codename "47", but today turned out to be an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Tokyo in his 30s. Winny was so efficient and popular that it generated problems even at the Japanese police and the GSDF.
As the Japanese police is the most advanced among the world in pulling P2P into criminal cases, outcry of users in Japan is expected."
ABC news
This isn't the first time.
Thanks
From pario (675744) in a previous article:
[quote]
Since Winny is pretty much unknown outside Japan, here is some background information for slashdot readers: Winny is a P2P file sharing program created by a Japanese programmer, who still remains anonymous to this day. It came out two years ago as an attempt to share copyright-protected materials "safely" when somebody was arrested for using another P2P program (WinMX). Since the application was extremely well designed and almost anything is available on its network, from movies to software, it has become immensely popular in Japan, so much so that there are a dozen book available on how to use it and network traffic in the country was down 20% after the news of the arrest broke. As for the reasons why the police was able to identify those two people who were arrested, they used an extra bulletin board feature, which does not guarantee anonymity unlike its file transfer feature, to distribute a list of warez videos. Therefore, I don't think this news has anything to do with the validity of Freenet's technology, or with that of Winny's for that matter.
[/quote]
The story of this arrest was posted in Slashdot Japan. And there are a lot of comments.
Notice: The article and comments are only in Japanese.
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Slashdot Japan
http://slashdot.jp/
snowy
http://slashdot.jp/~snowy/
I feel really sorry for this guy. I wonder if there is anything he can do to fight it? I havn't heard particularly favorable things of the japanese legal system. Winny was an excellant P2P program though. Anything you wanted, you could download, FAST. It was a great concept and would be interesting to see other P2P software take the same approach. Sharing was pretty much mandatory... but you couldn't see who you are sharing with, or what files they are downloading from you. But the ease of downloading is what truely amazes me the most. On a network like eDonkey, you can typically wait for hours before your download even starts, then have the download trickle across at 5kb/second. With winny it was INSANE. Downloads often started immediatly, and you normally get download speeds in the 20-50kb/sec range. It's entirely possible to download complete DVD ISOs in a day. And thats the reason it had to be shut down :|
...first of all, Winny is a Windows-only, closed-source program. While the author has taken some of the concepts from Freenet, none of the actual code. The BBS that caused them to be captured has no equal in Freenet, any BBS-like places you may find there is purely "userspace" running on top of Freenet.
Winny was designed to be very difficult to use outside Japan, not only was it exclusively in Japanese but it also refused to work on international systems with Japanese support (hint: You had to have japanese code pages by default, doable but not easy).
The network itself is still operational, but naturally there won't be any more development. Like Freenet, you could find pretty much anything there, but that didn't seem to bother the Japanese quite as much as the Western world, at least it was very popular.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually here in the Netherlands, if you buy a recordable medium (CD-R for example) you pay extra for it.
It's called (rough translation) the "home copying foundation".
It requires every recordable medium to have a special kind of 'tax' which is divided among copyright holders.
This might sound bad.
However, this also makes it legal to copy anything as long as you don't give/sell the copies to others. (so for now, no DMCA here. hurrah)
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
>He started its development in May 2002 and occasionally appeared on the web forum 2ch with his anonymous codename "47", ...
No.
His codename is "47-shi". The pronounce is "yon-jyu-nana-shi"
It means "Mr. 47" in Japanese.
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Slashdot Japan
http://slashdot.jp/
snowy
http://slashdot.jp/~snowy/
Hes been arrested for conspiracy to commit copyright violation (whatever that means) which i guess means "making something that we have decided is only for commiting criminal offences". Why boycott software??
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Or is it just because he made it difficult for them to crack the network he`d created that they wanted even more to "crack him", as an example?
That's the major theory currently doing the rounds in the media, but it's also been reported that when he released Winny, he gave as his reason for developing it "to demonstrate why current copyright laws are wrong and help to change them". While I think he has a valid point about copyright [uh oh, are they going to come after me now?], openly showing disrespect for the law isn't calculated to put you in law enforcement's good graces.
It also seems [Japanese] he's telling police that he "created Winny to foster copyright violations and destroy content companies who are bent only on legal action and don't try to find new business models to protect their copyrights". Take that as you will . . .
The problem is that he post in 2ch that his program would do a revolution of the copyrights.
Just if he just shutup and code, there would be no problems at all.
Just for the record, the files that got spread seem to be the result of a virus sent over the Winny network that puts everything on the victim's computer up for sharing, so I doubt the author would get directly in trouble for that.
If my boss decides not to pay me by the end of the month, he has taken nothing from me.
He's taken your time, which he had agreed to pay you for. It's like walking out of a shop without paying for something, or not paying your phone bill.
Copyright infringement, on the other hand, is different. When you illegally make a copy of something, the copyright holder hasn't used any time, effort or other resources. The only person using any resources is the one making the copy.
Weapons developers feel technical curiosity over the lethalness and strategic usability of their weapons.
Filesharing software developers feel technical curiosity over the efficiency and anonymity of their software.
How odd that the latter should be executed in the name of the law, while the former reaps fantastic wealth from military demand.
Probably best summed up by Andy Oram:
r /chapter/ ch01.html
"The Domain Name System (DNS) is an example of a system that blends peer-to-peer networking with a hierarchical model of information ownership. The remarkable thing about DNS is how well it has scaled, from the few thousand hosts it was originally designed to support in 1983 to the hundreds of millions of hosts currently on the Internet. The lessons from DNS are directly applicable to contemporary peer-to-peer data sharing applications.
DNS was established as a solution to a file-sharing problem. In the early days of the Internet, the way to map a human-friendly name like bbn to an IP address like 4.2.49.2 was through a single flat file, hosts.txt, which was copied around the Internet periodically. As the Net grew to thousands of hosts and managing that file became impossible, DNS was developed as a way to distribute the data sharing across the peer-to-peer Internet."
snip
"The namespace of DNS names is naturally hierarchical. For example, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. owns the namespace oreilly.com: they are the sole authority for all names in their domain, such as www.oreilly.com. This built-in hierarchy yields a simple, natural way to delegate responsibility for serving part of the DNS database. Each domain has an authority, the name server of record for hosts in that domain. When a host on the Internet wants to know the address of a given name, it queries its nearest name server to ask for the address. If that server does not know the name, it delegates the query to the authority for that namespace. That query, in turn, may be delegated to a higher authority, all the way up to the root name servers for the Internet as a whole. As the answer propagates back down to the requestor, the result is cached along the way to the name servers so the next fetch can be more efficient. Name servers operate both as clients and as servers."
Oram, A. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Available Online:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopee
Maybe you are talking about Buy Nothing Day?
Bingo; judges issue verdicts, and judges who don't convict don't get promoted. (Less reliably I've heard that usually the major objective of defense lawyers is to avoid upsetting the judges....)
But judges don't see most cases; the coerced "confession" rate is (from memory) over 80%, the total combined confession/conviction rate is 99+%. Bascially, if you aren't powerful, you're totally at the mercy of the police; if they decide to charge you that's almost always "it".
(As a side note, this uniquely polite police state also has the usual corruptions: the police are lazy (e.g. they didn't seriously investigate the early nerve gas test by the cult, they don't need to be careful about finding the right perp since it doesn't affect their case closure rate, etc. etc.), and they don't have very much power, so the powerful are usually off limits, including the yakuza (organized crime, which cut a deal with the LDP in the '50s to keep the unions in line and Communist free (the latter was important back then)...).
Your logic is flawed; it is a subset of the broken window fallacy. In your line of reasoning, you claim that people benefit from free copying of software, and no one gets hurt. This neglects the opportunity cost for software makers.
The success of capitalism is dependent on the practice of certain theories of economics. One of the most important is the concept of opportunity cost vs. accounting cost. For the purposes of this discusson, accounting cost is more like actual cost. While it is true that resources are not consumed in copying bits, the vast number of companies that depend on any sort of Intellectual Property would go out of business if that is all they paid attention to. To survive, companies must take into account the amount of money they lose based on the course of action they take.
For example, I decide I want to watch TV. But I could have spent my time selling subscriptions to slashdot. There is an opportunity cost of the money I could have made with the time I had.
In the case of Microsoft, they could do nothing and let people copy their software, or they could enforce copy protection. There is a huge opportunity cost between the two courses of action.
The reason this affects you is that it is one of the hidden assumptions of our economic system. You might not care about Microsoft, but you certainly would care if someone broke your bedroom window and claimed they benefited society. Now, you might not be claiming to benefit anyone but yourself by stealing software, but to claim no one is hurt is short-sighted.
But the guy wasn't arrested for running Winny, he was arrested for writing it, so your argument is a complete strawman.
Someone commented about recording artists... They are under the same guise. Concerts and tours (in general) are not large money making operations, they are advertising. That advertising results in album sales, which are the real revenue stream.
Nope, the artists generally make their money with merchanise and concert sales. The record producer makes the vast majority of the money from the album sales.
Finkployd
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