P2P's Okay in Spain

Filed in archive Government on March 20, 2010

© giladr

A Spanish court recently ruled that file-sharing is legal.

"Very rarely you'll hear a court decide that linking to copyrighted material is OK, but this is exactly how Spanish judge Raul N. García Orejudo ruled in a case of Spanish music collector society SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) vs. Jesus Guerra, owner of link site www.elrincondejesus.com," writes Mashable's Stan Schroeder.

"Orejudo ruled that offering links to infringing content is not the same as actually making that content available, writes MusicWeek's Eamonn Forde. "He added that in ElRincondeJesus.com's case it was not generating profits from access to this content and so could not be classed as a business benefitting financially from infringement of others' copyrighted works.

"One should not, however, read too much into this decision as an harbinger of things to come... in Spain, as in any other civil law country, there is no such thing as a judicial precedent, that is to say, where a prior judicial decision influences subsequent rulings by other courts," warns The Next Web's Pedro Telles. "Judicial precedents are found in common law countries such as England and Wales or the United States."

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