The penalty could be stiff: McOwen could face 15 years in prison, plus a fine of more than $415,000 -- calculated on the basis of charges for "$.59 per second" for use of 500 computers, including the cost of bandwidth, backbone, networking and frame relay.

Russ Willard, spokesperson for the attorney general's office, says, "We are currently investigating an allegation of misuse of state government property; I really can't comment."

"Apparently, they felt that [McOwen] didn't have the authority to download the program, even though it didn't adversely affect the computer system," says Joyner.

The programming community that follows distributed computing developments is, not surprisingly, up in arms. In early July McOwen sent out a mass e-mail begging for legal advice; he immediately received thousands of responses, including a story on the news site OpenP2P. A group of concerned software programmers started a legal fund for McOwen that so far has collected more than $1,200; McOwen says he's heard from the chief technologist at the FCC as well as from congressional staffers. "The outpouring has just been incredible," he says, gratefully.

	Print story E-mail story

The case may be attracting such attention because geek idealists see distributed computing as one answer to a host of intractable problems. Distributing computing systems have been aimed at problems as varied as finding cures for cancer or AIDS or predicting worldwide climate changes. If McOwen is found guilty, the negative publicity for distributed computing might discourage other universities and large institutions from lending their computer networks to the cause.

Or perhaps it's simply that the restitution charges don't seem to make sense: $.59 per second? Distributed.net staffers did not respond to a request for comment (according to McOwen, they have been subpoenaed for the case), but Dan Wertheimer, who founded SETI@Home, says that distributed computing applications typically don't use much bandwidth, since the screensavers connect to the Internet for merely a second or two every few days. "The costs are minuscule," says Wertheimer. "And it doesn't use much computer time -- it's a screensaver. It's hard to imagine this would hurt the school system."

There have been cases in the past of institutions that disapproved of distributed computing, but never because of the costs of the program. According to Wertheimer, some companies have expressly asked their employees not to install SETI@Home, not because it interfered with the network but "because they don't want outside code on their computers based on security concerns." But other companies, such as Sun Microsystem, have avidly embraced distributed computing and happily donate their entire networks to the cause.

McOwen and his attorney hope the promised indictment will never arrive; it remains to be seen what the final charges against him will be. Meanwhile, McOwen continues to ponder what, exactly, he did wrong. He worries that the future of the entire Distributed.net project is at stake simply because he thought that DeKalb's computers might be useful for solving collective problems. "If it's so damaging to them, then it must be damaging to the rest of the world, too," he says, wryly.

As Joyner puts it, "I've had a lot of criminal cases, and there's always an alleged victim in a criminal case. But where's the victim here?"

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.