Last week a 22 year-old was sentenced to 6 months jail for running a file-sharing site carrying links to copyright works. On the surface it appeared that court ruled that due to placing advertising on the site, the admin had profited from infringement and therefore committed a crime, but all is not as it seems.
A 22 year old man who ran a site which offered links to copyright works has been fined and sentenced to 6 months jail in Spain. While non-commercial file-sharing sites are legal in Spain, the judge decided that because the site had advertising and therefore profited from copyright infringement, this constituted a criminal offense.
A Spanish performing rights organisation has already fallen foul of the courts for the way it has collected evidence in royalties disputes. Yet, despite being punished for breaking the law in the past, it is unrepentant and says it will continue to do business in that way.
Fed up with the growing power of the anti-piracy lobby, a group of free-culture supporters gathered in front of the headquarters of the socialist party with their laptops, and started trading copyrighted files. The goal was to show that sharing copyrighted files is legal in Spain, something they appear to have achieved.
In September a Spanish court decided that the eDonkey indexing site Sharemula operated legally, indicating that linking to copyright infringing material is permitted under the law. Now that decision has been reinforced as a court decides that a torrent site previously shutdown by the police, also operated legally.
In a renewed effort to put a halt to piracy, Spanish Police shut down two BitTorrent sites. Todotorrente.com and trackertdt.com were both taken offline and three administrators were arrested and accused of facilitating “copyright infringement”.
European file-sharers were given a huge legal boost today when the Advocate General to the European Court of Justice declared that EU law does not allow Internet Service Providers to be forced to reveal the personal details of people accused of file sharing.
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