File sharing just became legal in Spain, changing the rules on what is legal, and what is fair.
In a court ruling that will surely shake the Spanish and European legal scene for years to come, a Spanish judge has today declared not only that sites containing links to copyrighted information are legal, but that torrenting copyrighted information for non-profit reasons is also inside of the law.
If you think that we are in some way confused, or kidding, here is a quote from the judge in question:
“P2P networks are mere conduits for the transmission of data between Internet users, and on this basis they do not infringe rights protected by Intellectual Property laws”
It is hard to confuse what that means. Provided that the sharer of the information is not profiting (garnering any revenues whatsoever), off of the transfer, then the action is legal now in Spain according to this new precedent.
Also, the same judge has ruled that websites such as elrincondejesus are perfectly legal, as there is no law on the books saying otherwise. Put together, websites can host torrents, citizens can download them, and torrent the files legally, provided that no one is making a profit along the way.
How long will this last? Time will tell, but happily for Spanish users of Bittorrent, today they are safe.
Via our friends at TorrentFreak.
Wow this is kind of a big deal for torrent servers right? Doesn't this mean that many of the best torrent sites can host their servers in Spain and not fear litigation? Time to start a Spanish web hosting company.
Wow this is kind of a big deal for torrent servers right? Doesn't this mean that many of the best torrent sites can host their servers in Spain and not fear litigation? Time to start a Spanish web hosting company.
Bingo mate.
This has really surprised me. But im betting that within the next 5/10 years that law will be overturned. We all know that torrenting is blatantly for stealing copyrighted work, so how they have deemed that legal, i don't know.
OR, make people host their torrent sites in Spain an then find a legal whole to bring them down.. ;)
Yay
La bahía pirata .es !!!
Make no profit, do no harm.
Copyright laws were originally written to protect against people *selling* material that they didn't have a right to. This is finally a decision that makes sense.
So you think it's OK to take other people's work and make lots of copies of it, so long as you don't make any money from it?
No. You may not infringe if you are in Spain and operating in Spain but if you are elsewhere (your machine serving its share of the torrent in the USA for example) you are under that local law.
What would have made more sense is that any portion is none infringing because it's useless. But the whole is still an unauthorised copy. I'm guessing therefore that the reasoning is you cost them nothing, you made nothing there is nothing to recover.
Wish I could read the Spanish.
Hopefully this goes a ways in getting copyright laws re-written.
Simply put, we are all seeing torrent site troubles all over the world and they are not going to go away. The powers that be need to realize this and evolve the way media is distributed / purchased / sold. You can't put everyone in jail and without an audience, you have no market. Without a society, you have no basis from which intellectual property is derived. Pay TV in the US has lost 800,000 households in 2009. Web TV is on the rise and anyone can have a web show. Entertainment is evolving and this is clear. Downloading copyrighted material is unethical but soon people will simply turn to other media if distribution houses become heavy handed and restrict all media forcing people to buy user identifier type codecs and ilok software keys and media players that will only play authenticated media. People only watch what is easy to be accessed – this is fact. Make it difficult and the next smart person will capitalize and cripple the industry – look at youtube for example, overnight success that kick-started web tv. Just my thoughts.
Simply put, we are all seeing torrent site troubles all over the world and they are not going to go away. The powers that be need to realize this and evolve the way media is distributed / purchased / sold. You can't put everyone in jail and without an audience, you have no market. Without a society, you have no basis from which intellectual property is derived. Pay TV in the US has lost 800,000 households in 2009. Web TV is on the rise and anyone can have a web show. Entertainment is evolving and this is clear. Downloading copyrighted material is unethical but soon people will simply turn to other media if distribution houses become heavy handed and restrict all media forcing people to buy user identifier type codecs and ilok software keys and media players that will only play authenticated media. People only watch what is easy to be accessed – this is fact. Make it difficult and the next smart person will capitalize and cripple the industry – look at youtube for example, overnight success that kick-started web tv. Just my thoughts.
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Rulings like this in Europe are interesting, but don’t necessarily predict anything that’s going to happen in the US regarding US copyright law. For now, there are always good ways of finding legal content on Bit Torrent. There’s a good list of legal content bit torrent trackers
http://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/how_find_free_and_legal_bittorrent_sites
And you can find a lot of them just searching Google as well