Winny developer Kaneko judged innocent
ファイル共有ソフト「Ｗｉｎｎｙ（ウィニー）」を開発・公開してゲームソフトなどの違法コピーを助けたとして、著作権法違反幇助（ほうじょ）罪に問われた元東大大学院助手、金子勇被告（３９）の控訴審判決公判が８日、大阪高裁で開かれた。小倉正三裁判長は、罰金１５０万円（求刑懲役１年）とした１審京都地裁判決を破棄、金子被告に無罪を言い渡した。 ウィニーをはじめとするファイル共有ソフトを用いた著作権侵害は増え続けており、開発者の刑事責任を認めるかどうかが注目されていた。１、２審を通じた争点は、ウィニーの開発が著作権侵害目的だったかどうか、面識のない利用者の違法行為に対するソフト開発者の幇助罪が成立するかどうかの２点だった。
Breaking news: Isamu Kaneko, the author of peer-to-peer file sharing software Winny is judged innocent at the higher court.
This is a big deal because he was arrested just for making the software that can be used to illegally share copyrighted materials. His arrest has been a risk for software developers in Japan, because it could mean, if your software can be used for illegal purposes you may be arrested or sued. Think if you write a web server, or a software to publish your iTunes local music collection as an XML, do you think it’s really safe when such a developer was arrested for writing the softwre?
I know it sounds a bit extreme and unlikely that you’ll be arrested by writing a web server, but essentially the reason for his arrest (and criminality in the base court 3 years ago) was just that.
While I’m so happy about his innocence (I talked with him at a conference in Tokyo last year, and he’s a very smart and nice guy by the way), I’m not really happy about the peer-to-peer file sharing situation in Winny/Share. In Winny and Share and other p2p networks popular in Japan, the protocol is anonymized and encrypted to some extent, and files are automatically downloaded and uploaded (or, spread) based on some queries, which makes it super easy to write a virus, which self spreads over the network and exposes private files in your computer by looking at My Documents and such.
There have been some serious incidents caused by this nature, like leaked private sex tapes or personal banking/financial information out of enterprise customer database, or even a national security information leaked out of the military. I know several people have committed suicides, because once your information is leaked there’s no way to stop that.