Pirlames Trojan Writer Distributed the Malware in Violation of Copyright

Masato Nakatsuji, a 24-year-old man from Japan and a graduate student of Osaka Electro-Communication University, admitted in his trial's first hearing in the District Court of Kyoto. During the prosecution, Nakatsuji, pleaded guilty to charges of violating copyright and of maligning the image of someone by attaching a virus to his photo.

Nakatsuji admitted that he authored a Trojan program to which he incorporated footage of copyrighted animation to work as bait. He also admitted that he used copyrighted pictures of popular animation characters and spread them via the Net.

People, who mistook the bait to be true and viewed the file online, risked a malware infection on their Windows PC. anti-virus companies identified this malware as the Pirlames Trojan that erased movie and music files from hacked computers.

The prosecution elaborated the process, Nakatsuji used, to allegedly write the computer malware that he attached to footage containing copyrighted animation and then promote the content on online bulletin boards and distribute it widely.

However, the defendant's lawyer said that the Trojan's malignancy was not severe, therefore, it wouldn't be just to impose any severe punishment on Nakatsuji for disseminating the virus since there is no law to rule against such act.

At present no law exists that regards the creation of computer viruses as a criminal act. Therefore, there were no charges made against Nakatsuji in connection with the Trojan itself but he was arrested because in disseminating the malware he used footage of copyrighted animation without consent.

A similar stand was taken for Isamu Kaneko earlier, when Kaneko wrote the file-sharing program named, 'Winny.' The malware came to be known as 'Harada' in the media of Japan and was spread via the Winny P2P file-sharing network. Kaneko was punished with paying fine in December 2006 for aiding in copyright infringement.

Two more men, Shoji Sakai and Katsuhisa Ikema, were also arrested along with Nakatsuji. Sakai is a 39-year-old employee in a company in Sakai City of the Japanese metropolitan Osaka while Ikema is a 35-year-old unemployed person from Amagasaki City in nearby Hyogo. The two have trial pending on them.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/2/2008