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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."
Should be arrested for naming it whinny.
You know you were thinking the same thing.
ABC news
... Black & Decker has been charged as an accomplice to many murders committed with their tools.
<sigh> I guess I won't bother trying to write any decent software then, if the possibility exists that I'm to be arrested for it. What would the point be?
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
I don't understand, does this mean that if I develop a really great and cheap duffelbag that I can be arrested if it's used by a bank robber?
Why not sue the computer manufacturers for abatement as well? There are any great uses for P2P, it is a great way to distribute music and video you have created, and I have distributed many animated shorts I have worked on via bit torrent etc...
How long will it be before someone sues the makers of a web browser, FTP, or IRC app for 'copyright abatement'?
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]
Well, maybe I didn`t quite get it right, but in what way exactly is what he`s done illegal? 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? Believe you me, maybe that will be the start of a new row of attacks from RIAA and MPAA towards program creators.
So you're saying that because software is used in a certain way, the author of said software is guilty of the same crime by implication?
...
In that case, better lock up everyone who contributed to the design and development of TCP/IP right now!
And I'm sure "the terrorists" have used MS software at some point as well
His arrest is controversial since there was no mention that he participated in sharing files, only for writing (and updating -- an argument used by the police that his act was deliberate) the software that enabled file-sharing.
He should be arrested as well. I mean c'mon! Who haven't had a private FTP-account long before the P2P-concept were even thought of? Or Gopher? I am sure some copyrighted literature has been made availble by gopher!
If creating technology that allows material to be pirated is a crime, I suggest all manufaturers of CD-R(W)s, DVD+-R(W) with associated burnes, harddisks, floppys, floppydrives, tapes, tapeplayers, dats, lossy as well as non-lossy data-compression technologies, not to mention microphones and every single net-capable electronic device be arrested pronto.
After all they're facilitating copyright infringement. Even digitally one might add for most of them!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Winny developer to arrest the Kyoto headquarters of police, 30 generation Tokyo University assistant domestic beginnings
Assuming that file sharing software "Winny" of the personal computer which exchanges the data of the popularity movie and hit tune etc. () by the fact that it develops, the illegal copy of the movie and music was made easy the Kyoto headquarters of police high-tech crime measure room and five provision stations, in doubt of the Copyright Act violation one help, requested option accompanying from Tokyo large assistant of 30 generations of the Tokyo residence even in 10th morning, set the policy of arresting. As for , being free on Internet, the program software which is open. As for questioning the software developer to "the one help" of the Copyright Act violation the domestic beginning. Stand case in the criminal incident of the joint ownership software developer almost there is no example even in the foreign country.
When the infringement of copyright which worldwide used the file sharing software has swaggered although you feel concern the administration of justice judgement even internationally for the illegal characteristic of the file sharing software has divided, it may call discussion centering on propriety.
That the file sharing software where with investigation of prefecture police/policing, as for Tokyo University assistant, anonymous characteristic is higher than past, is difficult to be exposed by the police opening will be sent plan. The major bulletin board of Internet with "2 don't you think? as development program is announced the ", 2002 May, it released the software of to itself home page. Using , as for Tokyo University assistant with no permission, the doubt which makes exchanging the data which infringes the copyright of the movie and the game etc. easy has in the literary work authority e.g., the salesman of Gunma prefecture (41) the inside = and others of the trial releases the data of the popularity movie to the many and unspecified persons person illegal with crime of = Copyright Act violation.
In addition, as for prefecture police/policing the policy of starting the forcing investigation of several places such as Tokyo University graduate school information science and engineering type postgraduate course even on the 10th.
Tokyo University assistant is special information processing engineering. It is called "47 people" with the net bulletin board, "the file sharing software which gradually can actualize anonymous characteristic appears and does not change the concept regarding present copyright the expectation which is stopped obtaining. It probably is about to try boosting the flow by your?", and so on with, development intention of had been explained.
* Infringement of copyright, the judgement which cracks internationally
The kitchen knife also and, can also be able cut the vegetable damage the person. Those where you accuse of a crime to the person are just the execution doer who kills and wounds. The handgun the person other than killing and wounding, in Japan the possession and production is prohibited with purpose. The Kyoto headquarters of police this time, the developer of the communication software, as for with "one help" of the Copyright Act violation it finishes stepping on in stand case, in the same software net society, it is equal to the development "of the handgun", that you probably can say that it judged.
As for , as for the data which is exchanged the necessity for the user to register to the provider without, it is entirely encoded. As for the prefecture police/policing high-tech investigation room, Tokyo large assistant who was developed the major bulletin board of Internet to "2 don't you think? from the speech
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)
Maybe not US anymore, but some place where writting multi-purpose software that protects privacy is not a crime. Japan's loss, that country's win. I just hope he doesn't have to spend long time in jail first.
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.
Well Lindows for one offers a discount for their os when downloaded via BitTorrent.
Also Blizzard Interactive should be offering game patches via BT as well. (couldn't bother to find the sources but you get the idea).
Kazaa had announced an agrement a few months ago to distribute short films via it's network.
A french movie producer recently introduced a "fake" bootleg version of it's movie on all p2p networks. What it was in fact was a Sort of Making of with exclusive interviewa from the actors. The tone was pretty much "you should rather support the movie by going to the theatre etc.." Was a great success from what I heard.
But yeah I agree totally with you. P2p networks are 99% used in an illegal way.
Yet philosophically I adhere to the idea of a self maintained network, not server reliant and thus not censurable.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
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
IANAL but I think that a very common form of punishment in Japan is to force people to sign up for japanese gameshows.
Anyone who has seen just glimpse of those should get my point...
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
>His codename is "47-shi". The pronounce is "yon-jyu-nana-shi"
Wrong. His handle is "47". People call him "47-shi", adding "-shi" as a honorific.
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
I am a post graduate student who is researching aspects of P2P software. Its a really fertile area for research that is now starting to get seriously damaged by the civil and criminal suits that are getting about these days. I know of one serious research group that has pulled their software, that wasn't even file sharing related, due to fears of being held accounatble for its use. I also have not released anything due to fears of retribution (and my stuff has bugger all to do with filesharing also).
I would like to extend my Masters research into a PhD but is it going to have a future for long enough? I hope that this will settle down and go the way of the fears of video tapes, PGP, cd burning, etc... But in the mean time research that will benefit ad hoc networking will suffer.
It will be a sad day if everything P2P is banned - I wonder if those companies with miss chat, dns, nntp, etc
We might actually have to go back to using Usenet and the streets of New York for our bootleg videos and music! How could we do that?
Easy. We could go to the streets of New York to download The Gangs of New York.
Alternatively, we could go to the gangs of New York to download The Streets of New York.
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.
I think my RIAA boycot just became a boycot of all copyrighted material*. I will never pay for a license to use again. No movie theaters, video game rentals, the works... until someone fixes this nonsense.
Arresting scientists crosses the line. I wouldn't feel right supplying the cartells that make this possible.
* = That doesn't permit redistribution.
Anyone but a hypocrite can tell you that most P2P apps are indeed made for trading copyrighted material, much like emulators are made for running copyrighted roms. Claiming that they have a lot of potentially non-infringing uses is just an excuse. Black & Decker tools are made for construction, and in 99.99% of cases they are used for construction work.
...is that according to it, computers should be outlawed. Yes, you heard me. Most every computer out there is a vechicle for copyright infringement of software, audio, movies, pr0n (which is also copyrighted), used to facilitate communication between people or such traffic and so on. Nevermind the millons of PCs that are spamming or infecting others, or anonymizing illegal traffic because they're open relays. All used for crime.
Same goes for everything running the network infrastructure. The Common Carrier status may protect them legally, but not in this context. They're all massively contrbuting to illegal acts. Right down to the computers running the Internet backbone itself.
Both private individuals and corporations typically have some form of violation, if nothing more than expired software they use anyway, or more users than they're licenced for, or being zombified spam/virus boxes.
Like P2P apps, computers in general have legitimate uses. But if you want to talk numbers, they too get drowned out by the fact that PEOPLE aren't law-obidient. That is neither the fault of computers nor P2P apps.
Welcome to general purpose computing, and general purpose communication. If the majority want to use it for something illegal, what do you do? There's simply no way short of crippling a PC into an appliance, limited to only do pre-defined tasks. If you can program it (even within a DRM-ridden sandbox), you can make it general purpose. And then you're back to square one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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".
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 . . .
What's disgusting about this Winny thing is that Kyoto Police Department thinks the development of Winny itself is not criminal, but 47's attitude against the copyright law is. 47 had basically said on 2ch that the copyright law must be largely restructured to reflect the digital era and that's a part of the reasons why he wrote Winny.
Japanese constitution certainly ensures freedom of speech and thoughts, but it sounds like KPD is a thought police.
so what the hell were these cops doing with this shady anonymous file-sharing tool on their hardware anyway - after all, there are no legal uses for this type of application, no?
The Japanese cops have no-one but themselves to blame there. If someone in the prefecture is using this software to download copyrighted works, then it is time to clean up their own house first.. Same goes for the military. Security is your fucking job, fools!
Even if the coppers were using an installation of Whinny to keep an eye on what's moving about on it, it does beg one question:
If an organisation keeps important and sensitive documents on a windows box running shady p2p warez-sharing apps, do you think that they should be trusted with such documents?
I reckon this is just sour grapes because the chief of police picked up a virus while downloading pr0n...
It's funny in polish language "winny" means guilty :D
Why is this moderated as informative?
10th day of the month. Even number userid. Post has 245 characters, starts with a vowel and ends with a consonant.
He is asking a question!!!
Doesn't mention that in the modding tables I use. Are you sure you've got the latest ones?
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
This disturbs me for one very obvious reason.
BytesTemplar.com
> Police said Kaneko was arrested because Winny
> allowed a 41-year-old man from Takasaki and 19-year-old
> from Matsuyama to illegally download pirated
> games and movies from the Internet,
So... arrest IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, WSFTP creators...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
You just used "download" as a synonym for "illegally obtain". We have a job offer for you, please send your CV/resume immediately.
Best regards,
the Record Industry Association of America.
Free as in mason.
What is the highest source of traffic through tcp/ip?
Porn.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Hey! A non-moron replied! P2P apps show the hypocritical bullshit that Slashdot is infested with. The EXACT SAME PEOPLE will complain all day and all night about POSSIBLE abuses of RFID tags and how they should be outlawed because MAYBE someone will invade their privacy and do something illegal, then they'll turn around and defend P2P to the death, despite about 95% of all P2P traffic being ILLEGALLY traded items. The bullshit part is that they'll argue how you can't condemn a technology because of possible misuse, then they'll go and do exactly that with RFID.
It's always been accepted that the posession and/or use of items that are used almost entirely for criminal purposes can be restricted. Brass knuckles, lockpicks, radar detectors, and other things have been restricted in some way practically everywhere. If P2P software developers don't get their shit together and come up with ways to get the illegal shit off their networks, the exact same thing will happen to them. The continued facilitation of LARGE-SCALE piracy does absolutely nobody any good.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.