According to Spanish police, the site caused the entertainment industries 535,000 euros in losses and made 30,000 euros in profits. Unfortunately the authorities didn’t have the benefit of foresight, which would’ve given them an understanding of how Spanish law would deal with a site that links to copyright infringing material.

In September 2008, a Spanish court ruled that providing links to copyrighted material is not a crime. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games, did not break the law. Furthermore, the court’s decision was final and could not be appealed.

If the ruling in the Sharemula case holds up, this means that TodoTorrente was not breaking the law either. Lawyer David Bravo who was involved in the TodoTorrente case, has contacted TorrentFreak with an update on the TodoTorrente situation. David notes that the coverage of the TodoTorrente raids and arrests had a great impact in the Spanish media, and further afield.

Of particular interest was a gloating editorial which published in Portal Latino, which claimed that TodoTorrente wasn’t “kids playing on a network” but an “illegal business”, and celebrated the closure. David explains that the media uproar this caused left little room for the arrested admins to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

However, after an application was made to Magistrate’s Court No.3 in Orihuela, it has now issued an interim order of dismissal of the case against TodoTorrente. The court decided that the site or admins didn’t commit any crime “since the investigation showed that the website was limited to providing links to downloads and didn’t offer downloads directly.”

Essentially, the court has decided that TodoTorrente operated in a similar manner to Sharemula. The decision is open to appeal, but there is no doubt that BitTorrent sites are getting closer to legality in Spain.

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

Spain’s Brigade of Technological Investigations claimed that the site was illegal and should be closed. Just under a year ago the case was heard, but sadly for the entertainment industry, the court ruled that the case against Sharemula should be dismissed. It said that neither the site nor administrators had operated illegally by offering links to copyright works, since they had not done so for profit or commercial gain.

However, the entertainment industry – including but not limited to Columbia, Disney Company Iberia, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner, Universal, Paramount, Sony and MGM, did not accept the ruling and appealed the decision.

Yesterday, the Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that the entertainment industry has no case against Sharemula, and since it has broken no laws, the case should be dismissed. This dismissal is final and cannot be appealed.

The court rejected all allegations that were made by the entertainment industry and concluded that indexing eD2k links (or torrent files) can not be seen as copyright infringement (pdf in Spanish). Sharemula’s main purpose is to index links, and they are not responsible for where these links go according to the court decision. Whether or not Sharemula makes profit is irrelevant.

“The hearing confirms the position of the defense that linking to P2P networks does not constitute a criminal offense,” wrote David Bravo, a lawyer in the case, noting that Sharemula did not store any copyrighted material. The site simply links to files that are hosted elsewhere, on computers of P2P users.

It is on this same premise that The Pirate Bay claims to operate legally. With upcoming cases against The Pirate Bay and Mininova in Europe, this decision is very welcome for p2p-site administrators.

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