Court found he used copyrighted material to illegally benefit from ads on the site, but he argues that they were only used to “economically sustain” it.
A Spanish court has sentenced 22yo Adrián Gómez Llorente to six months in jail and fined him €4,900 euros ($6,496 USD) for operating an illegal file-sharing Web site.
He was found have been using copyrighted material to benefiting economically via his site, infopsp.com, which created by him to offer movie and video game links. The profit motive was revenue he earned from advertising that appeared on the site.
Until now, legal cases in Spain involving illegal downloads have been shelved or the accused party was acquitted, essentially on the grounds that no profit motive had been proved. Several court cases in Spain had laid down jurisdiction that established that no crime is committed if no monetary exchange can be proved; the fact that a work was protected by copyright law was not taken into consideration if no profit motive was apparent.
The La Rioja ruling says Gómez “put at the disposal of [Internet] users means to obtain illicit copies of works protected by authors rights… obtaining a pirated copy in their computers without the consent of the [work's] title holder.”
The ruling says that in addition to making money out of the advertising on his site, Gómez also earned income from mobile phone SMS Premium messages. Gómez was tried and sentenced after being denounced by video-game owners’ association ADESE, and Spanish videographic union UVE.
Spain’s entertainment industry is hoping the case sets a new anti-file-sharing precedent. It follows a high-profile Spanish case against various BitTorrent tracker sites, which were accused by Microsoft, Spanish authors’ and publishers’ collecting society SGAE, Spanish labels association Promusicae, and rights group Egeda of facilitating links to copyrighted material via P2P application eMule.
Both a Madrid court in 2007 and the provincial Madrid high court in 2008 ordered a stay of proceedings in the case, arguing that offering links was not a criminal activity and did not violate intellectual property laws.
Llorente says the verdict will have no impact on other file-sharing lawsuits and that he plead guilty only to minimize the potential personal impact a drawn it case could have (GOOGLE TRANSLATION).
He also said that he hoped it would encourage other webmasters to fight similar charges, which are part of an overall strategy by entertainment industry " to find people like me who can not defend (themselves).”
Llorent emphasizes the fact that he didn’t benefit economically from the site, much like The Pirate Bay founders have argued, and that he earned only enough money to “economically sustain” his website.
jared@zeropaid.com
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