The Tokyo High Court has reversed the ruling of the Yokohama District Court regarding a web developer who was accused of operating a cryptocurrency mining program on his website without visitors’ consent.
According to the report by a local news outlet, the accused had been operating the Coinhive program, which mines cryptocurrencies on the computers of visitors on the sites in which they are embedded in and the reward is shared between the website operator and the program developer.
He had secretly embedded this program on his website between October and November 2017 and uses it to mine cryptocurrencies without the knowledge of those who visit his site and without giving them any chance to either accept or reject it.
In March 2018, he was brought before the Yokohama District Court and he was acquitted under the claim that the program had not made a huge impact on the computers affected and that he was not given any caution regarding the use of the software.
However, the High Court has recently overturned the ruling of the Yokohama District Court, saying that those factors were not solid reasons to acquit the young man.
When giving his verdict, Tsutomu Tochigi, the judge presiding over the case, said, ” visitors were not informed of (the mining program) or given the chance to reject it.”
The court further described the man’s action as “a malicious crime used for personal gain” and he was mandated to pay a fine of 100,000 yen ($910).
The 32-year old web developer, however, was not pleased with this verdict and according to his lawyer, he would appeal.
In a similar development in April 2019, a 33-year old Australian IT employee was busted for using government computers for unauthorized crypto mining operations.
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