Long Legal Battle Over Monero Mining App Comes To A Close

A long legal battle over a Monero widget that mines the coin is finally coming to an end as the Japanese music site developer who has been battling the courts, has won his Supreme Court case against the law enforcement as we are reading more today in our latest Monero news.

This case dates back to 2017 when the Yokohama-based Moroi Seiya used a crypto-miner Coinhive to develop an app on his website which allowed visitors to mine Monero. The app was since discontinued by Coinhive and distributed 30% of the tokens mined to the developers with 70% going to the site publisher. In the period between 2017 and 2018, the Japanese police cracked down on different types of crypto ming software and web widgets that make use of third-party central processing unit power and labeled a number of mining apps as viruses. Over a dozen web publishers in the country were hit with fines.

Moroi was hit with a $900 fine but then launched a lengthy legal battle against the police as he claimed that at the time he didn’t think he does anything illegal by simply using the app. The long legal battle culminated in a final act last year when he won the right to take the case to the Supreme Court after he initially failed with his case in the branch of the Tokyo High Court. Accoridng to the Supreme Court Documents, the highest court in the land ruled that the mining software could not be considered malware as the police initially claimed. Moroi didn’t hide the fact that he was running the Coinhive on the site so he had not engaged in deceiving his visitors.

He also noted that running the script earned him a mere $9 worth of tokens which is why the fine was hard to justify. Moroi’s legal campaign was partly crowdfunded and supported by Japan Hackers Association and in the blog post, he thanked the group as well as his legal team, saying that even though he was found not guilty, he has a lot of things to reflect on.

As recently reported, A new monero malware is targeting enterprise networks according to the new report from cybersecurity company Sophos that detailed a new variant of the Tor2Mine malware.