This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Legal
Spanish indies to sue government over piracy
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 24 February 2010
A consortium of independent labels and music distributors in Spain are planning on suing the country’s government for negligence for failing to respond to the growth of online piracy, which, they say, has desecrated the country’s record industry. What fun.
As previously reported, the Spanish courts have not proven overly helpful when the record industry has tried to combat file-sharing using the country’s existing copyright laws, and the IFPI recently specifically picked out the country as one where the legal system has completely failed to protect intellectual property rights in the digital age. The indie labels now going legal presumably reckon the Spanish government had a duty to fix its copyright laws as soon as it became clear the country’s courts were not going classify file-sharing of unlicensed music files as being illegal.
According to Billboard, the consortium of indies, which includes Blanco y Negro Music, Discmedi, PIAS Records Spain, Popstock, K-Industrial Cultural and Picap, has presented a document outlining the government’s failures in the copyright domain to ministers, and has given them until mid-March to respond, otherwise they will sue. I think they want the government to compensate the indie record label sector for the losses they have incurred because of rampant piracy in Spain.
As also previously reported, the Spanish government did recently announce a new initiative to tighten up the country’s copyright rules, mainly by making it easier to close down websites which aid infringement – so things like The Pirate Bay or Oink – but the indies reckon it’s too little too late.
PIAS Spain’s Gerardo Carton told Billboard: “The proposal is insufficient – they could close a website one day, and 500 new ones could open the next day in the Ukraine, for example. The measure would not resolve the most relevant problem, which is the actual impossibility of us taking civil action against those final users who appropriate music without paying, and systematically violate intellectual property rights”.
He continued: “We think the administration is responsible for our plight. We demand that the government take effective measures imminently to protect the rights and interests of the record industry, as well as the intellectual property rights of the agents that intervene in the creative musical process within internet”.
