Will allow judges to shutter websites accused of copyright infringement in as little as 4 days compared to the year it currently takes.
The Spanish govt recently approved anti-piracy legislation that will allow a judge with the National Audience, the country’s federal court, to close or block websites accused of facilitating copyright infringement within 4 days as compared to the current year-long process.
“The new judicial procedure has no legal loopholes,” says Spanish vice president Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega when announcing the measure.
Included as part of the Law of Sustainable Economy Bill, the legislation will allow copyright holders the opportunity to lodge infringement complaints with the Culture Ministry’s Intellectual Property Commission which is comprised of independent professionals from the legal, technological and judicial sectors.
“It’s a positive step,” said Joan Navarro, head of the Coalition of Industries and Creators of Content. “They are going after the producers of the piracy, those who spread works without permission from the authors. Not the users, which is the case in France and the U.K.”
That’s precisely what sets the measure apart from places like France or South Korea where they’ve enacted anti-P2P legislation specifically targeting users and not the sites that facilitates illegal file-sharing.
The original bill, first proposed last month, didn’t require a court order to close websites accused of copyright infringement, and also required ISPs to divulge the names and information of alleged file-sharers without court order.
Many quickly objected to that version, crystallized in the manifesto In Defense of Fundamental Rights on the Internet that “Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”
The version just passed is seen as a “happy medium” between the two interests.
“As long as there is previous authorization on the part of a judge, it preserves the fundamental rights of expression,” said Barbara Navarro, director of Institutional and Governmental Relations at Google Spain. “These kinds of issues require a fast reaction, but it has to be balanced and fair and protect our rights.”
It’s obviously still too early to see what kind of effect the law has, but it’s painfully obvious that file-sharers will simply switch to sites located outside the country’s borders as did file-sharers in the US long, long, long, ago.
With judges in Spain having already ruled on numerous occasions that individual file-sharing is legal so long as there is “no talk of money or any other compensation beyond the sharing of material available among various users” I suppose the only thing left to target was the P2P sites that usually do.
Stay tuned.
So in other words, most free bittorrent-tracker sites like BTjunkie or TPB should be within a definite gray-to-legal area, and old-style sharing apps like gnutella/kazaalite will be back in style.
No matter your views on pro/con free filesharing, at least Spain seems to have some sort of civic process in legislation.
So shutin down sites because someone pirated is deh keey. What noobs. I will upload me music to ed2k/kad , ares, soulseek, epicia, and winMx. Fk deh mafiaa.
If it wasn’t for piracy, meh good muzac woundn’t be heard.
Fuk Deh Man…