uhh, just so everyone knows, this is an extremely rare ruling. In Asian countries (this is a generalization, of course), the courts are rarely truly independent. That’s why everyone is SHOCKED the verdict is actually overturned.

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”?