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Spanish file-sharing site operator jailed

By | Published on Tuesday 12 November 2013

Bajatetodo

For years Spanish copyright law proved unhelpful when the music industry pursued the operators of file-sharing services through the courts, though legislative changes in the country have possibly created one of the most hardline systems for combating piracy.

According to Torrentfreak, a man who ran a BitTorrent indexing site in Spain, which was mainly used to provide access to mountains of unlicensed content, is facing an eighteen month jail sentence after being found guilty of criminal copyright infringement. The man was also fined 21,000 euros and banned from creating or managing websites for three years.

The sentencing comes at the end of a long running legal battle for the Spanish music industry, which began litigation against numerous file-sharing websites in 2006. Police action followed in 2007 with ten people being arrested. One of them was David León Marín, who ran the site Bajatetodo, and whose case finally reached its conclusion in court last month. His sentence was made public last week.

Although some will almost certainly say that jail time for the operators of file-sharing sites is too extreme, Spain’s Federation For The Protection of Intellectual Property welcomed the ruling, which it says mirrors another case that reached its conclusion earlier this year and resulted in a similar sentence for another BitTorrent site administrator.

A spokesman for the Federation told Torrentfreak: “The significance of this ruling is that it confirms what other Spanish judges have also estimated, and what we have always maintained in our defence of intellectual property, which is that linking is an act of making available to the internet user and should be considered a continuing offence against intellectual property”.



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