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."
No, I'm not bitter about this coming up after having decided to move to Japan. sigh...
(Well, to be fair, Japan's copyright law does have a clause allowing personal copies, which is recognized as valid by pretty much everybody, and which even the local press is mentioning in their articles on this, like this one. But they also have a DMCA-like clause that pretty much negates its effect for encrypted stuff.)
This guy is screwed! Japan has a conviction rate of over 90%. Why? I dunno, check this: (http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/le/papers/9907/9 907001.abs)
Slashdot posts story about 2ch. Next story is about 2ch user "47" being arrested. Coincidence? I THINK NOT! :)
Was this software built soley and intentionally for sharing copyrighted works? If not, this is a frightening story. I've written software that would now be called "P2P". Then, nine years ago, it was called a distributed system (as opposed to client/server). The problem is, it could easily be used for sharing copyrighted works, although back then that use didn't occur to anyone.
So, does intent matter any more and how does it apply to this case - or can we expect anyone involved in (for example) the design of TCP/IP to be hauled into jail? It's the logical next step.
When you read the English translation of the original Japanese article, a particular bit will jump out at you (human translated here):
The kitchen knife, which is for cutting vegetables, can also be used to injure a person. The person who kills and wounds is the one accused of the crime, but in Japan, posession or production of items is prohibited when it is known they will be used for illegal purposes.
It's named WinNY to mark it as successor of WinMX.
Talk about being up-to-date, the Wikipedia-Article already mentions the arrest.
I recall hearing a while back that Japanese courts had a 99.8% conviction rate. After all, if you weren't guilty you wouldn't have been arrested, right?
:).
Anyway, Wikipedia has a small article, which backs that up somewhat (and no, I didn't write that part
deus does not exist but if he does
We have the same thing in Sweden - and that tax will INCREASE when we get the European DMCA (EUCD) equivalent next January.
it's in my head
I have a friend here who uses lawyers in Japan on a weekly basis for reviewing contracts etc, and his comment was that this will take years to even get to court, since Japan is one of the few countries in the world that actually has a lawyer shortage. If you needed any more reasons to move here ....
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
he got the shaft.. from the Mainichi Daily News Japan: Winny has already stirred up considerable controversy within Japan this year. In March, a virus swept through the program, picking up investigation records from a Kyoto Prefectural Police officer's computer and whisking them around cyberspace. Other police documents and Self-Defense Force materials have also been spread across the Internet through Winny. Cops probably had a hard on for this guy ever since their investigations records ended up on Whinny..
The article in japanese says that that's one of the reasons that guns are illegal in japan: can only be used to kill people.
47 wrote the software, and according to the comments on 2ch the police decided that the motives behind writing Winny were purely copyright infringement, so it is not considered as a knife which can be used for good means, but as a weapon which can only be used for crimes.
is KANEKO Isamu, 33, was relatively well-known in Japan as a talented 3D-programming programmer, too (though it's not known until today that he is the "47"). His personal homepage has many 3D-programming stuff, including flight simulator, realtime 3-D body model generator, PBO-FS(Prototype-Based Object File System), missile simulator, and realtime motion-generation by physics calculation. His academic concern was fast 3D physics calculation, network design, and OS design.
Please get a clue.
Like not using Romanji, and actually learning the damn Japanese?! You get a clue!
FACT: Japanese people do not use Romanji. Neither should you.
Reading the words of the Japanese law, or the procedures, will leave you very misinformed. Although it is often the case even in the U.S. that the police will twist the perception of the law, or just blatantly ignore it, this is a much more frequent case in Japan.
The sad thing is that the Japanese people don't seem to mind it, as long as the media seems to report it as "the right thing to do", and it is a well known fact that the major media outlets do a lot of ass kissing.
There are exceptions of course, people that understand the severity of the issue, people that lobby against the blatant miuse of legal forces, and the occasional newspaper article that isn't worried about pissing off the gov't. Unfortunately, it's a pretty rare exception.
The only difference is this time, even the media's first announcements of the incident included some opinion on how this could be a very sticky situation. They specifically mention how the producer of fruit knives aren't arrested just because some dork decides to stab someone with it. The police have compared this to the production of a gun, which they say has only one use: harming people. Personally, I would say it is used for hunting, self defense, and thus has legitimate uses. All that said, the news papers have mentioned that even Winny has positive uses, and although it can and most often is used for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material, it is merely a tool.
The assistant professor that created this piece has written in 2ch that he made it in order to challenge the way current copyrights work, and the business models behind them. I think his heart was in the right spot, but method was wrong. However, I STILL think he produced a very good package, and whether or not he is willing to believe his own story or not, there ARE positive uses.
I am actually currently trying to get ahold of his attorney (more specifically, I'm trying to figure out who is attorney is) because I want to stand in court and testify for him. I am a member of a group that has ideas that are contrary to current laws. Our group is civil, we don't break any laws, and we are politically active in voicing our opinion. However, we are also very underfunded, and a majority of the members are scared to speak out in public or offer internet bandwidth for the transmission of materials, especially videos of our public events, because the Japanese police are notorious at using all the tricks in the books to supress free speech. The method we've taken? Winny.
I would like to stress again that our political movements are NOT ILLEGAL, we do not participate in any illegal activities, and are strictly voicing our opinion. However, there is reason to be scared. I am one that has little to lose over going public, and have actually done so multiple times during various events. And I would like to stand in court and testify because the arrest of the Winny author is in direct contrast to our best interests, and we are an obvious case of legitimate use of the software.
Many of you may laugh at how "backwards" Japan and it's legal system is. Watch out though, the situation is worsening every day in the U.S., and you may be seeing similar headlines "coming soon".
This Police mentioned in your story is the same Kyoto Police that WENT TO TOKYO to arrest Winny's author, a Tokyo resident.
Think different states in the US. It is like hearing Chicago Police going to New York to arrest a New York resident. Something must have motivated them so much...
Faraday cage. You can smuggle stolen stuff with security tags out without tripping the alarms. Or so I presume.
There are plenty of checks and balances on the police, far more than in Japan for instance. There only appear to be a lot of police excesses because there are a whole lot of police and in general so much here is an open book. A comparitively large fraction of the excesses are reported. It's like violence. Over the course of my life, I'm suppoesedly enjoying the lowest crime levels every here in the US. But I wouldn't know it to look at the news. Why, there is a lot more news, that fractures the audiance, so they have to find ever more dramatic material. And what's more dramatic than death, or people greviously wronged by a monolithic uncaring government.
For example, if the police stopped me on some bogus pretense because I'm creepy and gave them a bad vibe, taking my back to the precinct. Then proceed to interogate me and give me the impression that I'm not free to leave without actually saying that, but still don't read me my rights, and under the pressure I confess to a string of killings, and where the evidence is. I'm probably going to get away with the murders. Oh I'll be famous for it. But I won't be going to jail. Stuff like that happens frequently enough. One of the "unjustified" shooting out in my area was of a mentally unbalanced man who fired of a shot or two in a supermarket and was walking down the street weapon in hand. Another was a conviced felon who was shot to death in his car with his illegal handgun in reach. There was a march for him. Near where I went to college there was a guy who when stopped for a traffic ticket shot a cop through the spine. One man's excess is another's vital self-preservation. And with the stakes we play that game over here, there just aren't any do-overs if something goes awry.
But back to the media. Look at the comparisions between My Lai and Abu Grade prison. Today, there are a couple of dozen deaths, a dozen of which might be murder, and wide spread abuse, possibly including rape. There have been inklings of it for a few months, and full on total coverage and impending court martials of the century for a months or so. With My Lai, President Carter called on the American people to support Lt. Calley in so called ralleys for Calley and shout down the ultimately true allegations. As you may or may not have seen lately, Hugh Thompson is returned to a more welcoming spotlight for his role in ordering his helicopter crew to fire on US troops if they attacked those fleeing the massacer. I think Calley ended up with something ridiculous like 4 years for a stand out brutal example of mass murder. And that's about as far as the punishment and justice were able to go. Now you have congressmen from both parties calling for Rumsfeld's head on pike. And as odious as Rush Limbaugh is, compared to My Lai, what happened in Iraq was a fraternity prank. The difference is the pervasiveness of the media.
that IIP, the Invisible IRC Project, died recently? Or does no one care in favor of Japanese efforts at privacy and file transfers? IIP in conjunction with Freenet was a one-two punch by folks who still value privacy, and half of the effort just died because no one cares enough to support it. Let some Japanese P2P author get persecuted, though, and we get a big /. writeup and a million comments. One man arrested is a shit story compared to the hundreds of thousands that IIP + Freenet could bring under the privacy umbrella. Thanks guys.
There's one article you won't see in English; the mail that hiroyuki (2ch's maintainer) sent out to the 2ch mailing list.
According to what he says, at the time that Kaneko (Mr. 47, the developer of Winny) was supposed to have made his comments about Winny being developed for the purpose of anonymous breach of copyright, 2ch didn't keep IP logs (it does now).
Which means the Kyoto High-Tech Crimes Division is going to have a tough time proving that it was him who made those comments...
I can specifically decline to accept the GPL, and my additional rights to the software terminate at that point. However, this still permits me to use the software that I have legitimately acquired.
The Windows Freenet installer will not let me past the GPL licence screen until I click "I agree".
Opportunity cost is itself a flawed concept, or at the very least can't be used in an argument about making ends meet. For example:
...). Now, for every person who downloads a copy of one of those songs instead of buying it, there is an associated opportunity cost. However, there is also an associated resource which is brought into the system (i.e. that the person could buy the song means that the maximum the artist could make has also increased). So the net is zero, and answers to questions that hinge around reak monetary values aren't changed.
Let's say I make a $30000/year salary but I could make a higher salary based on choosing a different job, and what I need for survival is $20000/year.
Now, my immediately available resources are that 30k/year, which is sufficient for me to survive. As I become aware of the money I could be making (i.e. my opportunity costs are more accurately determined) that doesn't change the answer to the question: do I have enough to survive? So even if my opportunity costs grow, they're always met by the growth of the number from which they're subtracted.
In the case of music sales, lets say that an artist has 10 dedicated customers who always buy their new songs, and they make new songs at a constant rate. The income from that would be roughly constant (barring inflation,