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Spain Outlaws P2P File-Sharing
Section_Ei8ht writes "Spanish Congress has made it a civil offense to download anything via p2p networks, and a criminal offense for ISP's to allow users to file-share, even if the use is fair. There is also to be a tax on all forms of blank media, including flash memory drives. I guess the move towards distributing films legally via BitTorrent is a no go in Spain." Here is our coverage of the tax portion of this law.
Yes it is, but its usually much faster to download the patch from a http or ftp mirror. In the last patch they also added a "Background Downloader" which downloads parts of the next patch when those parts are ready (enabled by default). Most users dont even know about this; I can see either alot of arrests/exemptions?
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Yes, yes they are. It's a simple case of selective enforcement. Spainards will have to download their WoW patches via P2P safe in the knowledge that Blizzard will not sue them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
To be fair, the article starts with; A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use.
I assume the patches would fall under "authorized peer-to-peer file-sharing".
Bypassable by you and me.
Not bypassable by Joe Average or as it is in Spain that should actually be Pedro Promedio.
Anyway, the only winners out of all these will be CacheLogic and Ellacoya which can do the enforcement and guess who has been the longest running trialist of their kit.
Guessing once, twice, thrice...
Yep, right guess. Telefonica.
This looks like the local equivalent of Baby Bell has bought itself a law that coincides with the way they see the network. By the way, compared to them even Ma Bell was a pinko commy hippy progressive.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Slashdot just took a severe dive with this lie. The headline is a lie. The brief is a lie. Read the article and discover the truth for yourself. If this site continues to head down this complely disreputable path, I'll go somewhere else. It's not like there aren't good and honest alternatives out there.
For crying out loud editors, put aside your greed (for that's the most likely motivation for this) and get some integrity.
The owners of this site might do well to consider just firing the editorial staff for FUD-mongering in the worst form.
And before you mod this out of existence, consider that I've probably been a Slashdot member for a hell of a lot longer than you, and I may just know what I'm talking about when I express my disgust at this slide into mediocrity and irrelavance.
Moreover if it is only civil offence the ISPs are not oblidged to release your personal details from your IP address unless they get a court order. Thats why they make the ISPs also responsible. My guess is that the ..AA guys will spy upon the fileshareres, and the ISP will get a letter saying this guy 80.255.255.255 has been downloading and distributing so so music and films, then the ISP cutting off the Internet (temporarily or permenantly) to the guy for violating terms of service..
well, bullfighting is common in france too
I live at Barcelona (Spain, Europe), and I can tell you that who wrote the article has misinterpreted the whole thing. I'll try to clarify it a bit:
1) A "canon" will be fined over blank media (optical and flash), but hard disks and volatile RAMs are excluded.
2) Still exist the "private copy right", when there is no meaning of making further money selling/dealing with downloaded data (in spanish "sin ánimo de lucro").
As corollarius, can be said that the "canon" has been aproved due to the fact of admiting two points:
a) The citizen is right to get and give (aka share) data from a P2P network, or share a phisical book or disc without having to pay to the author.
b) The "canon" is intended to compensate in some way the point (a).
Well, after my try of claryfing that the P2P it is *not* illegal in Spain (neither for downloading a movie nor for a disc, while not intended for making money of it), I'm against that canon, as it is indiscriminate, thus not fair.
There are many organizations here fighting for civil rights to revert the "canon" law/instruction.
Right, if you are, lets say, in Spain and you download Maddonna, Sony Spain Inc. can ask you for 20 euros for the album. If you upload to 10 people you own 10X20 plus your own=220 euros, etc.
Here you go. While an actual figure like "10th in the World" is hard to compute accurately, the figures given in the link should show that Spain is not exactly a struggling country.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I'll put this here at the top so people can read it as they obviously (and I'm looking at you here mr article poster) can't read the actual article.
Spain has outlawed the downloading of copyrighted files over P2P (previously it had been judged that downloading copyrighted material for personal use was allowable).
Wow! Shock horror!
Oh, that makes them the same as every other country then.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
All this fuss...
All they did was outlaw unauthorised files, as in illigal, as in not approved by the author.
How hard is it to read the article? No, really?
I was thinking the same thing. I'm trying to find the actual text of the law on the spaniars news outlets but no luck so far. There are lots of talk about the blank media tax (but IIRC they were already talking about it when I went there on vacations about 2 years ago) but nothing on P2P. It also strikes me odd that the government would require ISPs to block all P2P traffic considering that the RTVE (the national radio/TV, kinda like the BBC but from Spain) is actually using P2P to transfer some of its content online (source: http://www.aristasweb.net/noticias.php?idn=4024&cl ase=100 , but it's in spanish).
In the US (Spain is probably similar...most countries have similar copyright laws since the Berne convention), the RIAA is not involved with this money. It is distributed by an independent panel which spreads the money around based on the previously noted sales figures. They use fixed percentages to determine what bodies get the money (e.g. x% to labels, y% to publishers, z% to songwriters, etc.). Interestingly, their system bypasses teh normal trickle-down system where money is paid directly to copyright holders (labels and publishers usually) and then distributed through royalties from there
This is kinda offtopic, but here in Norway it is getting worse. We already a filter/firewall that blocks underage/children pornographic sites, which is a good thing in my opinion. But the problem is that they are now proposing to extend this filter to block simple sites like for example forums discussing illegal things like for example illegal drugs, sites showing regular porno, gambling sites because gambling is now to be made completly illegal here.
:(
Norway is not so free afterall..
since the link provided forces us to wait for a redirected page to load. Here is the complete text of the article:
[June 27, 2006]
Spain outlaws P2P filesharing
(Daily Variety Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)
MADRID
A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use.
The legislation, approved by Congress on Thursday, toughens previous provisions. An early May circular from Spain's fiscal general del estado, or chief prosecutor, allowed downloads for purely personal use.
Now Spaniards caught grabbing content from, say, eMule, will have to reimburse rights holders for losses --- although such losses will be difficult for authorities to track.
But the government is going after Internet service providers; it's a criminal offense for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading.
The law also introduces a small tax to be levied on all blank media --- from a blank CD to mobile phones and even a memory stick. Computer hard disks and ADSL lines have been left out of the legislation despite their widespread use for illegally copying music and films. The money collected will be paid back to the owner of the copyright.
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Spain's greater antipiracy clarity received a thumbs-up from the Motion Picture Assn.
"Compared to some European countries, Spain has some way to go in enforcement," said Duncan Hudson, the MPA's Brussels-based VP and director of operations for antipiracy, even though Spanish police closed 17 illegal Web sites in a nationwide raid April 8.
"But the new intellectual property law is a definite step forward, placing obligations for instance on ISPs to provide information. Hopefully, it will help us to get some injunctions," he added.
Spain's telco giant Telefonica reports 90% of usage on its broadband lines is Internet traffic, up from 15% five years ago. Of that 90%, a massive 71% is P2P traffic.
Since the Audio Home Recording Act was passed in 1992. It doesn't affect most people though. It places a royalty on cassettes and special music CD-Rs.
What's a music CD-R you ask? You might notice if you have a consumer music CD burner (and very few people do), the only media it will accept are specially labelled music CD-Rs. These cost more than the regular CD-Rs you use in your computer due to the royalty that is placed on them.
They're pretty rare now, since most people use the burner in their computer, which takes regular CD-Rs. Also, it doesn't usually affect people who record their own music on CD-Rs, since professional burners (the ones you buy at a musical instrument or pro-audio store as opposed to a stereo store) do not require the special discs either
Not that I'd know, having never been to South Africa, but if you trust the Telkom website, you're both either half right or half wrong, depending:
TelkomInternet powered by ADSL ~ Access options
TelkomInternet powered by ADSL provides both a shaped and unshaped service. Simply put, this means that we have built a service that will best meet your individual needs. For the general user the shaped service will fit most needs adequately.
* Shaped ~ In layman's terms, the shaped service prioritises keystroke activities - things you do while sitting in-front of your PC. So when you're surfing your favourite site, doing your banking online or checking you e-mail, this option will work best for you.
* For those of you that need to know more, read on. The shaped service distinguishes between the various protocols used over the Internet. The main priority is HTTP. At present, all international HTTP traffic is transparently cached for ADSL users. All international un-cached data is shaped. The following un-cached protocols are prioritised on the network: HTTP (in certain cases HTTP is not cached due to website incompatibilities), HTTPS, FTP, Mail (POP3, SMTP and IMAP), SSH and TELNET. Any protocol not mentioned above will receive a lower priority on the network. Unshaped ~ In layman's terms, whichever activity you are doing or leaving your PC to do, while not there, all available bandwidth will be used for this application or protocol.
* Unshaped ~This service will offer you unshaped international bandwidth and a higher data transfer rate. The unshaped service will not shape the un-cached protocols. All protocols will therefore share the available bandwidth equally. Similarly, local bandwidth will remain as is with no shaping implemented. Keeping this in mind, this service is typically designed for a niche market including, for example, your typical Forex Trader, specific gaming applications, secure work from home options and VPN's. All these applications can use unfamiliar protocols, which are not necessarily bandwidth intensive but require an unshaped service to work optimally.
Good GOD.. I'm spanish and you don't know what are you talking about.
/ noticias/2860.htm. The money goes to the SGAE and they redistribute it acording to their criteria, artists don't directly affiliated with them will receive no money, yet the SGAE will collect money for _every_ song.
1. What's autorized and what unautorized in the first place? There's a private organization that decides: the SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores). I suggest you read the wikipedia article about them.
2. The blank levy existed before the private backup law and this levy exists because of the music piracy, that's how it passed. Besides, it's not a bit more, it's 40-50% more http://www.asimelec.es/htmventa/Noticias/redinoti
Stick the collateral damage up your ass, I'm not willing to be stolen by a bunch of thieves that support no more than 100 groups/artits and charge for all. My hard earned money is worth more than that.
AND, this tax it's not only for CD.. it's gonna be passed for every media capable of holding a song: hard drives, usb disks, dongles.. everything. So, yes please, steal 40 euros for an HDD originally priced at 100 and charge 140!!! After all it's just collateral damage!!!
Man.. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE THAT'S WRONG WRONG WRONG. I can't believe you got modded insightful for that pile of trash you wrote.
Excuse me for my harsh language, but speaking about the SGAE stirs my nerves.
An angry spaniard.