Pressure Grows on Spain to Curb Digital Piracy

Pressure Grows on Spain to Curb Digital Piracy In the last decade, a surge of music and movie sharing online in Spain has thrilled fans, but it has also increased pressure from as far away as Hollywood to clamp down. Spanish lawmakers are expected to vote this year on a measure that would allow the swift closing of sites suspected of facilitating file-sharing.

“The triumph of downloading in Spain is partly because people can watch the latest episode of their favorite American series with Spanish subtitles weeks before it gets dubbed and released on television here,” said Javier de la Rosa, a former radio presenter who is now a journalism professor at Francisco de Vitoria University here. “The quality and speed is also excellent nowadays, and some Web sites like Series Yonkis even help people by ranking downloads according to quality, so that’s very user friendly.”

The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.

For the third year running, the American trade representative has included Spain on its watch list of countries that breach intellectual property rights because of its “particularly significant Internet piracy.”

Critics say it will be extremely difficult to stop illegal downloading in Spain because of the popularity of these Web sites and a perceived indifference to piracy as a crime. As many as three billion illegal downloads were made last year in Spain, far exceeding the 21 million legal downloads, according to a study by Cimec, a Spanish market research company.

Judges have also shown ambivalence toward the issue. In 2006, the attorney general advised that peer-to-peer downloading should be considered criminal only if done for profit.

“We have a tremendous shortage of cultural education and administrative efficiency so that nobody in Spain, not even the judges, seems to believe that you can go to jail for an intellectual property crime,” said Fernando Fernández Aransay, a partner at VTF Abogados, a Spanish law firm specializing in media issues. “Edge cardThe problem is not that Spain doesn’t have laws but that there are in fact too many, which means more confusion.”