As a result the Spanish Government proposed new legislation last year under which sites offering links to copyright works could be taken offline without a judicial order. This could potentially shut down all the major file-sharing sites, and is generally seen by the public as a plain act of Internet censorship.

This legislation, an amendment which is part of the Sustainable Economy Law (LES), was drafted by Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde with help the United States Government. The proposed legislation, also known as ‘The Sinde Act’, has been widely protested by the public and last month these protests resulted in a major victory for those who are against the legislation.

After a lengthy debate the House of Representatives decided to adopt the Sustainable Economy Law, but reject the controversial amendment. This meant the law would go to the Senate without the amendment, but yesterday this turned out to be idle hope.

Just hours before the deadline to submit new amendments passed, a coalition of The Socialist Party (PSOE), the People’s Party (PP) and Convergence and Union (CiU) reintroduced ‘The Sinde Act’ with some minor changes. This decision comes after several weeks of meetings behind closed doors between the involved parties.

The new and revised version of the legislation has been changed on a few points, but the main goal still stands. It will make it easier for the authorities to shutdown P2P sites and others that facilitate copyright infringement. The proposal will be voted on by the Senate in the coming weeks.

The major change compared to the previous version is that the new Sinde Act will allow for more “judicial control”, which in reality means that a judge has to sign off on a request to hand over the details of a website owner. However, there is no judge required to determine whether a site is “infringing copyrights” or not.

Today the Spanish news is dominated with hundreds of reports on the new legislation and the reactions from the public are not mild. The majority of Internet users and many artists disapprove of the new legislation, and even the President of the Academy of Cinema, Álex de la Iglesia, criticized it as “a law that does not suit anybody.”

“It would have been better to start from scratch. It is a law that from the beginning has been very unpopular,” De la Iglesia added. Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde did not want to respond to this critique and said the law promotes “innovation” and poses no threat to the Internet at all.

The law will now be sent to the Senate in a few weeks where it’s expected to be passed through easily by the three parties who approved it yesterday. However, the public is not yet giving up yet, and major off- and online protests are currently being planned. No doubt that we will hear more about this in the near future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It comes as no surprise that the announcement has been met with firm opposition from activists and hacktivists, who quickly organized several protests. Two weeks ago someone defaced the site of a local anti-piracy outfit, replacing it with a manifesto on the rights of Internet users.

Today, the group ‘Hacktivistas’ launches yet another campaign protesting against Spanish Government plans. The campaign is titled La Lista de Sinde, which is a reference to the Spanish title of the movie Schindler’s List and a direct response to the ‘list’ of 200 file-sharing sites that the major royalties collection societies presented to the Ministry of Industry recently.

The campaign website allows the public to embed a search box on their own website, turning it into a ‘file-sharing’ search engine. Users can choose a box that searches the BitTorrent site isoHunt, or one that uses a customized Google search engine that indexes many file-sharing sites.

For their part, Hacktivistas will then make a list of all the ‘sinning’ sites who use the embed code that they offer. Once this list is long enough it will also be sent to the Ministry of Industry with a clear message, along the lines of: ‘You’ll have to go after all of us.’

“The goal of this action is to tell the Government: ‘if you are going to close 200 sites, here are another 200,000 – you will have to shut the whole Internet down!’ It is a strategy of massive social disobedience,” a member of Hacktivistas told TorrentFreak.

“We hope that this action raises even more awareness and the Government steps back. If they don’t and the law is finally approved, we will ask them to prosecute us. We’re confident that a situation were the Government has to close thousands of websites won’t be sustainable for them,” the Hacktivist added.

Those who want to participate in the campaign can grab the code on La Lista de Sinde.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.