Will the pain in Spain fall mainly on those with blame?

According to Reuters, Spain has now passed legislation that will make it a criminal offence to run a website that provides links to sources of unlicensed content, and anyone convicted of running such an operation could face up to six years in jail in "aggravated cases". The law only targets those sites that are run for profit (but that includes those making "direct or indirect profit") and the Spanish government has said that carrying advertising would be sufficient to bring a website into the system. The new legislation introduced as part of a wider reform of the country's penal code.

The new law enables rights owners in Spain to target websites and operators who facilitate copyright infringement - as well as those who actually distribute copyright material without licence. That said, the new law recognises the legitimate functions of both search engines and P2P networks, and both are seemingly specifically excluded from the new rules. Users of link-sharing sites would also be excluded from the new provisions. Confirming the new rules, Spain's Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon told reporters: "This is a real balance between protecting copyright and new technologies": Reuters suggest that the move is to keep Spain away from the top of the USA's naughty list (the USTR's Special 301 list) with one Spanish minister, the country's Education and Culture Minister Jose Ignacio Wert, more or less admitting this back in April when acknowledging that the new laws were a move to avoid trade sanctions saying "this reform should satisfy those who are worried about Spain's insufficient level of protection for intellectual property".

In March 2013 The Spanish Council of Ministers approved  the draft reform of the Intellectual Property Law, also known as Lassalle law, designed to "punish more harshly some breaches of intellectual property rights" and preventing payment processors and advertisers dealing with infringing websites. Back in January 2012, seemingly after the US had threatened Spain it would be added to the priority Special 301 list, Spain introduced the so-called Sinde Law designed to offer greater protections for rights holders, which included a provision to close infringing sites. Since that law came into force, it has been criticised as ineffective and cumbersome, and Spanish internet traffic has been switching away from websites providing links to copyrighted material, which were targeted by the law, towards peer-to-peer or content-sharing services.

The new legislation is expected to come into effect by the spring of 2014.

More on TechDirt

Spain's anti-piracy law “may already be obsolete”

Reuters report that Spain’s new anti-piracy laws – the so called ‘Sinde’ web blocking law and procedures may be having little effect with users switching away from websites providing links to copyrighted material, which were targeted by the law, towards peer-to-peer or content-sharing services instead. It seems that the closure of the MegaUpload site has simply accelerated the trend, and many of the pirates have simply re-directed their activity towards peer-to-peer platforms to access copyrighted material. P2P platforms are not covered by the new legislation and have been protected in Spanish courts provided they are “not for profit”. About half of Spanish adults admit to having downloaded audiovisual content from the Internet for free according to a poll by the state-run CIS public opinion surveyor.

In other news, Microsoft has confirmed that users of its instant messaging app are now being stopped from sharing links to The Pirate Bay, though the IT firm says the block has been instigated because of malware fears rather than any bid to block Bay-enabled copyright infringement. A spokesman for the company told The Register: "We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/26/net-us-spain-piracy-idUSBRE82P0JV20120326

Bull baiting in Spain

In an attempt to sabotage the new ‘Sinde' anti-piracy law that is scheduled to go into effect in Spain at the beginning of March, TorrentFreak reports that hundreds of Spanish websites are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites are all linking to an “infringing” song - a copyrighted track from the artist Eme Navarro, who’s a member of the music rights group SGAE, but critical of the Sinde law - to the protest, who will then report the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests. It seems that while Navarro generally publishes his music under a Creative Commons license, he created an “all rights reserved” track specifically for the protest. Thanks to the hacktivist campaign hundreds of websites are now linking to this copyrighted song without permission, and Navarro reported a first batch of sites to the Ministry of Culture early on the 1st March. The theory is that as a result, the commission tasked with reviewing all the requests will be overloaded with complaints. All the reported sites have to be processed on order of arrival, so the protest will significantly slow down this review process.

http://torrentfreak.com/arists-and-hacktivists-sabotage-spanish-anti-piracy-law-120301/

Spanish Courts ignore Sinde principle

Another Spanish court has found another internet service free from liability for the actions of its users, holding that Cinetube, which redirects web-users to film files online (the majority of which are unlicensed), free from liability for copyright infringement. Spanish courts have generally not been willing to hold such websites liable, especially if they are not run for profit. The landmark precedent in Spanish law involves the P2P file sharing service Sharemula, again held free from liability, although that case was distinguished in another more recent Spanish case where the operator of a file-sharing links service who profited from ad sales and SMS services was found liable.

However, Spain is on the brink of a major change with the proposed implementation of the “Sinde” law and whilst the legislation is currently subject to a challenge in the country’s Supreme Court, Cinetube is known to be high up on the target list of the content industries, who hope the new web-blocking law (if and when implemented) will overrule past precedents and enable them to force ISPs to block access to websites that link to illegal content.

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/legal-and-management/spanish-court-dismisses-case-against-major-1006189552.story

ACTA and Sinde in the news

Against a backdrop of Europe wide protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty that aims to harmonise some key elements of intellectual property law around the world, comes news that some EU signatories, including the Czech Republic, are now re-considering their position. Whilst a number of EU countries including Germany have so far not signed the Treaty, the British government remained committed to ACTA with IP Minister Baroness Judith Wilcox telling reporters: "It was important for the UK to be a signatory of ACTA as it will set an international standard for tackling large-scale infringements of [intellectual property rights], through the creation of common enforcement standards and more effective international cooperation. During the negotiations, we continually pushed for greater transparency as we believed that this would have led to a better understanding of the agreement by the public".

We also have news that Spain’s law Sinde - the country's new website blocking law - will be challenged in the country's Supreme Court, who have agreed to hear an appeal from the Association Of Web Users who claim the law is unconstitutional, saying that only a court should be able to force a alleged infringing website offline. The Spanish Supreme Court confirmed it will consider the AOWU's claim, and have stayed moves by the Spanish government to implement the practical aspects of rolling out the new Sind regime pending their hearing.

More on Sinde here and more on ACTA here

Spain implements web blocking law

The BBC reports that the Spanish Parliament has implemented the somewhat controversial Sinde law. The legislation, which had already been enacted into law, will make it easier for content owners to target copyright infringing websites from March 2012 onwards. The draft legislation was initially criticised for being ‘US influenced’ and, like ‘three strikes’ Law Hadopi in France, because it lacked any provision for scrutiny by the courts. The latter point has been rectified and the legislation creates a government body with powers to force internet service providers to block sites. The Intellectual Property Commission will decide whether it wants to take action against an infringing site or the ISPs and websites providing links to infringing content and the case will then be passed to a judge to rule on whether the site should be shut down, this judicial process being completed within seventy two hours.

A report commissioned by a coalition of Spain's rights-holders suggested that piracy in Spain cost legal content rights owners $6.8 billion in the first half of 2010 alone, claiming 97.8% of all music consumption and 77% of movie downloads in Spain were illegal. Illegal downloading in Spain constitutes around 45% of internet use according to market-research firm Nielsen, compared to 23% average in the top five EU markets.

The law Sinde, named after the former Spanish culture minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde and introduced by the previous Government, attempts to introduce new regulations which will reduce levels of illegal file-sharing and would offer a fast-track system through which content owners can force commercial websites that exist primarily to assist others in their illegal file-sharing offline – potentially within ten days of a complaint being made.

Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria who announced the full passage of the law a year after it was first passed, said that the aim of the law was "to safeguard intellectual property, boost our culture industries and protect the rights of owners, creators and others in the face of the lucrative plundering of illegal downloading sites."

In the UK, the three strikes provisions of the Digital Economy Act remain dormant although Mr Justice Arnold’s decision in Newzbin 2 has proved effective in forcing BT and encouraging other ISPS to block access to infringing sites. In France the aforementioned law Hadopi has resulted in some 18 million (yes, really!) IP addresses being monitored in first nine months and Hadopi, the body set up to administer the policy, said in mid-2011 that it had sent a total of 470,000 first warnings by email, with 20,000 users receiving a second warning. That said, only 10 people who appeared to ignore the two warnings were asked to come and explain their actions to the agency.

Opponents have promised to flood the Spanish courts with appeals over what they say is an unconstitutional attack on freedom of expression and are also promoting a boycott of artists who have supported the anti-piracy law and distributing legal instructions to avoid prosecution.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16391727