My friend Yuichi Kawasaki writes from Japan:

Today I have a news that should be told to you.Yesterday two WinMX user was arrested by japanese police.As you know WinMX is one of file sharing applications similar to Napster.

They share adobe photoshop and some business applications.These application totally cost 7M Yen and the number of shared filescount 2,400.

These two users share these files without money, just only share them.This arrestment is the first case in the world when people share fileswith file sharing applications, one of peer-to-peer applications.

I completely disagree with illegal file sharing.But I concern this case steps into banning every file sharing andpeer-to-peer aplications.

I can’t find any news sources carrying this story yet, but it’s notable — this is the first time I’ve heard of rightsholders criminallly pursuing the users of a P2P network, rather than the technology providers.Discuss