Launched in 2015, Zoowoman was a popular Spanish non-commercial film repository.
The site did not store any movies, but it hosted links to approximately 11,000 titles before it was shut down.
The site was purportedly operated by a group of people, including film enthusiast “El Feo,” who is also the creator of La Filmoteca Maldita, a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers dedicated to film analysis and criticism.
El Feo told TorrentFreak that the site focused specifically on films that were out of circulation commercially, discontinued, or otherwise difficult to access through normal channels. As such, the project was recognized for its uniqueness and reportedly used as a teaching resource by several universities across Spain and Latin America.
However, despite their educational value, the films were not necessarily in the public domain, and many were protected by active copyrights. As a result, Zoowoman eventually attracted attention from rightsholders. And while the site specifically asked “creativity vampires” to leave it alone, that didn’t last.
Zoowoman Raid and Prosecution
In 2021, El Feo’s home was raided, with the authorities taking over the Zoowoman WordPress admin account using credentials recovered from his phone. The police locked the admin out of the site and blocked public access to the archive while leaving the hosting account untouched.
The enforcement action eventually led to a lawsuit backed by EGEDA, the Spanish audiovisual rights management headed by Enrique Cerezo, who is a film producer and president of the football club Atlético de Madrid. Through court, EGEDA requested two and a half years in prison and damages of €870,000.
The action against Zoowoman coincided with the launch of FlixOlé, a subscription streaming platform for classic Spanish cinema also backed by Cerezo, which served an overlapping audience.
After several years, the Zoowoman case went to trial earlier this month, where the prosecution presented evidence that the defendant generated approximately €12,000 in streaming income from YouTube, Patreon, and PayPal over four years. While this revenue wasn’t generated from the Zoowoman website, the prosecution argued that the defendant profited from the overall ecosystem.
The prosecution also argued that the film archive facilitated widespread copyright infringement, which also affected EGEDA as a collective rights management outfit.
“El Feo” Fights Back
Speaking with TorrentFreak, El Feo noted that the €12,000 in revenue cited by the prosecution is completely unrelated to the defunct film archive. In fact, the defense argued that he had stepped back from the project in late 2019, roughly two years before his arrest, because his YouTube work had become too demanding.
Nonetheless, the police investigation highlighted him as the sole and main defendant. According to El Feo, the other WordPress admins were reclassified as regular users by the investigators, effectively reducing the case to a single defendant.
“They came in, converted the rest of the admins into users, to focus the investigation on me. Better to have one defendant than 15,” El Feo told us (translated from Spanish), while stressing that he is glad that the other people who were involved in Zoowoman did not get in trouble.
Critically, El Feo also noted that the police failed to preserve the site’s server logs. As a result, there was no record of which administrators were accessing the site or from which IP addresses. According to El Feo, this means that he wasn’t able to mount a proper defense.
El Feo released a video on his case on the La filmoteca maldita YouTube channel earlier this month, after the trial was completed. At the time of writing, however, the verdict has yet to be released.
The verdict is expected to be released soon. The outcome is likely to be watched closely by digital preservation communities across Spain and Latin America, where Zoowoman built a dedicated following among cinephiles and academics.
