Jan de Wit, the 21-year-old Dutchman who was sentenced last September to 150 hours of community service for creating and sending out the Anna Kournikova e-mail worm, is appealing the verdict, his lawyer said Friday.
“My client does not agree with the conviction. We believe that he should be found not guilty,” said Theo Jansen, De Wit’s lawyer in Sneek, the Netherlands. “You could say that my client was clueless. He disputes that his intent was to do damage and it has not been proven that great damage was done.”
No date has been set for the appeal, but Jansen expects the court will wait until after the Dutch summer vacation, which ends in September. Last year’s verdict was the first handed down against a virus writer in the Netherlands and one of the few such verdicts in the world.
De Wit was charged with spreading data via a computer network with the intent to cause damage, a crime punishable by four years in prison and a maximum fine of about