The arrest this week of the Japanese author of a popular online file-sharing program appears to be an extreme reaction, by American standards at least, to his alleged abetting of copyright infringers, according to a patent attorney in Chicago. In what’s been reported as the first arrest of a software developer for helping others to violate copyright law, police pinched Isamu Kaneko, 33, a teaching assistant at the University of Tokyo and the author of Winny, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program that’s been downloaded by anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million people, most of them in Japan.
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Arrest of Winny Author ‘Overkill’
Posted by: John P. Mello Jr. May 13, 2004 07:14 AMThe arrest this week of the Japanese author of a popular online file-sharing program appears to be an extreme reaction, by American standards at least, to his alleged abetting of copyright infringers, according to a patent attorney in Chicago. In what’s been reported as the first arrest of a software developer for helping others to violate copyright law, police pinched Isamu Kaneko, 33, a teaching assistant at the University of Tokyo and the author of Winny, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program that’s been downloaded by anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million people, most of them in Japan.