Japanese High Court Realizes That Developer Of File Sharing Software Shouldn't Be Liable For Infringement
from the good-news dept
Back in 2006, we were disappointed by a Japanese court decision that found the developer of the popular (in Japan) file sharing software Winny, guilty of copyright infringement. The issue, like in so many other cases around the world, was whether or not, by just creating the software, he had "induced" infringement. But by blaming the developer of software for how others use it, the courts put a significant chill on innovation. It suddenly creates massive liability for any developer. The case was appealed, and the good news (via Slashdot) is that Japan's High Court has overturned the lower court's decision, saying:"Merely being aware of the possibility that the software could be abused does not constitute a crime of aiding violations of the law, and the court cannot accept that the defendant supplied the software solely to be used for copyright violations."Nice to see common sense win every once in a while.
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Common sense...
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now if the knife came with detailed instructions for how to kill someone and pictures of that knife sticking out of someone's throat ... maybe a different story
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I bet this has no effect on R4 cards...
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On a side note, whatever "the people" try to accomplish by removing the author of winny or the program itself off the Internet really failed miserably. For people who are unfamiliar with the p2p file share scene in Japan, Japanese people don't really use bittorrent, because they have amazingly HUGE pipe. When we were still crawling along the 5mbs, 10mbs lines, most Japanese people already have fiber in their house, so they don't have to "save bandwidth" with bittorrent
anyways, tangent. When winny was claimed to be "hacked" and become un-secure, long and behold someone come up with a new program, called "share". Eventually, "share" was deemed moderately safe so someone come up with a program called "Perfect Dark". Each of the successive application becomes even more encrypted and de-centralized. Since Japanese people's got bandwidth to waste, those applications actually route through other users so you can't really tell who it came from and who it's for. The point is, whatever they are trying to do, it's just driving the file sharing deeper underground. Heavy handed approach don't make people stop, they just go do it in darker places where you don't see them. An even bigger problem is that they create applications that even un-tech-savvy people can use easily, thus increase the number of infringement.
Remember someone said that "If it starts to rain in the desert, it's time to get a new business model"?
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The hell are you talking about? A lot of people are /lucky/ to have those speeds in the US! I'm hugely fortunate to be able to get 25Mbps!
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