Spanish Judges Say P2P is the Same as Loaning Books

A Spanish court cleared the website of any guilt for containing links to copyrighted content, saying that there has always been some form of the sale or loan of books, films, music and so on, straight since ancient times. That�s what happens now with P2P services, with the only difference that all content is now digital.

Spain keeps holding the first place among countries that push back at excessive demands of the entertaining industry. Recently a Madrid provincial court ruled that a website is not responsible for copyright violation committed by just containing links to other websites hosting copyrighted content.

A three-judge panel said in their ruling that sale and loan of books, films and music have always existed in some form since the very ancient times. The only difference now is for the most part in the medium people switch to � earlier it was analog media or paper, while now all files are in a digital format allowing a more efficient and fast exchange of a better quality. Moreover, the great advantage of it is availability through the Internet on a global scale.

The court considered evidence that the website doesn�t host the actual copyrighted materials, but only links to places where they can be found, and decided there can�t be any profit earned from the content. The court didn�t consider the presence of advertisements on the webpages containing links to be an offense.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida, the lawyer of the office defending the case, said that the court found 8 final judicial decisions proving the legitimate existence of this website. He also added that the Spanish judges have taken up a position of freedom in the web.

It has been for years that a number of Spanish judges have come to a decision that file exchanging is considered legal as long as there�s no money or other compensation involved beyond the exchanging of content available among many users. In a similar vein, noncommercial peer-to-peer file-sharing is legal. That is perhaps the main reason for the US Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus pointing at Spain on its �Piracy Watch List� (a list of Top Priority Countries), which contains countries they claim to be lacking copyright law enforcement. It even resulted in complaints of Sony Pictures Entertainment that piracy in Spain is so widespread that Hollywood is thinking over discontinuing selling DVDs there.

(source unknown)

[This message has been edited by Taike (edited 06-22-2010).]