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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.
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/
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.
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 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).
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
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.