NotCliche

Sharing of copyrighted materials might be banned soon!

Share, a popular P2P program in Japan which distributes thousands of files that ranges from anime, manga, music to even eroges is undoubtedly the choice of program for many Japanese users over the more commonly used torrent. However, it seems that the Japanese government is toughening itself against P2P users.

Police has arrested about 10 individuals on suspicion of using the Share file-sharing program to distribute anime, manga, music, movies and all the other sorts over the internet. The arrested individual ranges from the age group of 20 to 60, and is across several prefectures in Japan. The arrested people had distributed a wide variety of items ranging from games, anime and music.

In addition to the program called Share, there has been many iterations of the Share program, and one of them being the earliest called Winny in 2002. Developed by a then anonymous computer engineering student, the program was extremely popular with many people and was often used to transfer huge amounts of anime, music, manga scanlations and the likes. However, due to some flaws in the program, authorities had arrested 2 Winny users and it’s developer. After the supposedly decline of Winny due to the flaws, Share was quickly developed by others with the promise that it would be more secure than Winny.

Of course, other than Share and Winny, there’s still other P2P programs out there such as Perfect Dark. These are basically improved version of Share and Winny, and often promises greater anonymity and speeds for their users.

Currently, the Japanese copyright law prohibits uploaders but allows downloading for private use. However, the current Japanese government is trying to push for a law to make both uploading and downloading of copyrighted materials illegal.

Strange law, since you could probably download copyrighted materials legally, provided you don’t sell it or anything of the sorts, but it would be illegal for you to upload the very same materials. Not only that, we might very well see the demise of P2P sharing if the current government comes through with their new copyright law…

Via: ANN.

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