Japanese judge acquitted maker of P2P application

The Osaka high court acquitted last Thursday the developer of the Winny file-sharing software program of copyright violation. Reversing a guilty ruling by a lower court that imposed a Yen 1.5 million fine.

The 39 year old developer “Isamu Kaneko”, published the software which offers a opportunity to exchange specific files like movies, music and other files through peer to peer on his website in 2002. Accordingly he was accused of violation of copyrights by assisting two users to illegally make files available for downloading. The defendant who’s a former University of Tokyo researcher said he was not guilty in regards to the accusation. He argued to the higher court that certain technologies always carry the risk to be abused. Should that be a reason to prosecute the engineer because his technologies were misused?

“It cannot be said that the defendant published the software to encourage copyright infringement, thus its public opening cannot be recognized as abetment of copyright violation,” said presiding Judge Masazo Ogura in the ruling.

While the defendant should have known the possibility that his software might be abused, “the defendant did not encourage illegal acts”.
He rejected the prosecutors’ argument that Kaneko developed the program intending to undermine the copyright system and that he encouraged unlawful copying of protected content.