After a legal process lasting more than 7 years, the creator of Japan’s most popular P2P file-sharing application has finally been cleared by the country’s Supreme Court. After his initial arrest in 2004 on copyright infringement grounds, the former university researcher has been on a roller coaster ride of convictions, fines, and appeals. Now, barring a dispute on rare technical grounds, his ordeal is over.
A 31-year old Japanese man has admitted to uploading 3 TV-shows and sharing 165 more on BitTorrent after he was arrested by Tokyo Police’s Cyber Crime unit. In his confession the man told the investigators that he used BitTorrent because he believed it was free of viruses and police. He was proven wrong on the latter.
Cyber-crime police have arrested a man who uploaded the movie ‘Wanted’ to a file-sharing network. The man, Kazushi Hirata, was detained after he added custom subtitles to a pirated copy of the movie and uploaded it to the Internet, in advance of its Japanese theatrical release. He faces up to 10 years in jail.
The author of a bizarre virus which threatened to kill file-sharers has been arrested in Japan. Has he been arrested for making death threats? No! For writing the virus? No! This is the 21st century. He’s been arrested for copyright infringement, of course.
In just over a year the number of internet users file-sharing in Japan has increased by a staggering 180%, says the results of an online survey. The average number of files downloaded has more than doubled.
A strange virus which taunts file-sharers and threatens to report them to the police and even kill them, is being distributed on the Winny network.
Filesharing is getting more popular in Japan according to a recent survey by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). 3.5 percent of the Japanese Internet users is actively using p2p software to share files, compared to 2.7 percent last year.
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