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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
From pario (675744) in a previous article:
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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.
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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.