chosaq

The year of Winny

When browsing through the international version of the Google 2004 Zeitgeist, I was surprised to find out that “Winny” turned out to be the second most popular Google Japan query in 2004. The Winny case, on which I reported before and which is similar to the still ongoing Grokster case, was extensively reported about on a number of websites (e.g. ITmedia’s Winny coverage), but I didn’t expect it to be a more popular search term than, say, Yuko Ogura ;-).

The final ruling in the Winny case is scheduled for the beginning of 2005; in December 2004, a Kyoto inhabitant was already convicted for sharing copyrighted material by means of the Winny P2P software.