back to article Spain seeks fast track for pirate site shutdowns

Spain has proposed a new anti-piracy law that would let intellectual property police play a speedier game of whack-a-mole with websites serving illegal downloads of music and films. The measure allows a judge to act on a complaint filed by the newly formed intellectual property commission at Spain's ministry of culture by …

COMMENTS

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  1. Stuart 14
    Thumb Up

    shut down google!

    Please pass the law, after all it's only spain and the hit on googles wallet would be so much fun.

  2. Winkypop Silver badge
    FAIL

    Noooooooooooobody...

    ...expects the Spanish Inquisition!

    1. N2

      our main elements are...

      Fear, surprise & a fanatical devotion to the Pope?

  3. jake Silver badge

    Online bonking?

    That word "bonking" ... I don't think it means what you think it means ;-)

    What ever happened to the British English / American English slang/jargon translator that ElReg was supposedly working on? I'll volunteer to help edit, should be good for a laugh :-)

  4. Tom 35

    facilitating piracy

    If the definition of "facilitating" is left up to the record companies that will be just about anyone they don't like.

  5. Frumious Bandersnatch
    Joke

    qw(The Spanish Inquisition)

    that is all.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Canon Digital

    In Spain, you pay a 12.50 euro tax every time you buy an internal or external hard disk to compensate "rights holders" in the event that the hard disk is ever used to hold "pirated" material. No burden of proof required there, just an assumption of guilt.

    Flash drives, MP3 players and even mobile phones are subject to similar but smaller taxes.

    Presumably if they shut down all the pirate websites they will be rescinding this tax...

    Ninguna probabilidad.

  7. Richard Porter
    WTF?

    Lost $1.6bn ???

    I suspect that assumes everyone who downloaded a copyright file illegally would have bought it had the free download not been available. Either that or it is a figure plucked out of thin air.

    People have only so much disposable income. If they have to spend it on one thing they can't spend it on something else. The entertainment industry isn't going to get money that doesn't exist!

  8. Jelliphiish
    Thumb Down

    title = federal europe

    The RIASS are used to dealing with a federated group of mini-States. much like Europe is. if they gain a foothold in one, then they use it to influence the surrounding states. Spain would be an easy one to Hit..

    also: " websites like Google could be subject to shut-down under the law."

    translates as " local state government see an opportunity to leverage options against the corporation in question either for fund-age or other favors received. quid-pro-quo."

    Google are cash/power-rich and any national/state legislation that gives the government that leverage is going to be popular. they have costs to cover, after all.

  9. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    lost $1.6 billion in revenue

    Yeah, we know how THAT is calculated :

    - accuse thousands of filesharing

    - do not check that IP address and physical location concorde

    - accuse said victims of activity far in excess of what actual bandwidth allows

    - tag an exorbitantly enormous price to each alledged infrigement, effectively creating an accusation for which the penalty is more severe than for murder

    - serve up collated cases as cold, hard cash lost, not mentioning that nothing has actually been won in court yet

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    Ominous

    "The legislation is part of a larger Sustainable Economy Law" - so we have to sustain the obscene profits of an obsolete industry? Oh, how the buggy whip manufacturers must be rolling in their graves.

  11. Vincent Ballard
    Pirate

    Tax

    I don't suppose Promusicae also published figures on the amount raised by the blank media levy in Spain?

  12. Tony Paulazzo
    Flame

    Dear governments of the world

    What a shame you're this good at protecting the entertainment industries bottom dollar yet fail so miserably at your supposed core profession, ie, maintain your countries economic viability, keep the roads open and be the servant of the people.

    Please stop this fracking planet and get me the hell off of it!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Why don't they ...

    just make up the law as they see fit? Just like the police in the UK.

    Especially useful when there's no one watching the watchers...

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    The pain in spain falls mainly on...

    ...the vain.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Our chief weapons

    Are surprise, fear, and a fanatical devotion to sucking off big corporations.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Governments are going to turn themselves into Pariahs

    The Net is not TV, it is not broadcast.

    IP numbers can be denied, and IP numbers can be white listed.

    Governments and all their systems will soon find themselves denied the Net or shown something completely different. Government doesn't really buy anything, so no big shakes if they are denied left, right and centre.

    And it makes it very hard to prove anything in a court of law, any web page can be mocked up in a matter of seconds, and access from a court approved system would just show what people wanted to show.

  17. Dazed and Confused

    Silly money figures

    Every time these topics are discussed the Music/Film/What ever industry trots out ludicrous figures for lost revenue.

    I agree that downloading music is wrong but then is so is lying about how much it hurts you.

    At best the figures are an indication of how much money worth of music is being listened to that has been paid for. But in no way does that correspond to lost sales. In my day we taped things from the radio. Then we listened to our favourite tapes. We these lost sales? No, I could not have afforded to buy the record I was taping so the alternative wasn't a lost sale, but that I did something else.

    When I grew up and so did my spending power I became a record/tape & eventually a CD buyer. I bought the music I'd fallen in love with as a kid BACK WHEN I COULDN'T AFFORD TO BUY IT.

    If I hadn't been able to tape the music back then I almost certainly would not have bought it later.

    So please explain to me where the lost sale is?

  18. bexley
    FAIL

    i like that idea

    creating a false interwebz for the governments etc to look at while we all get on with our stealing in peace.

    Bloody hard to effect in reality though, not impossible though.

    The good thing is that it's only (well almost only) public trackers that are taking all the heat and that is mainly due to their brazen defiance (read : the pirate bay).

    There are many, many more private trackers with userbases ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands.

    Some of these have false front pages with hidden login buttons and strict rules regarding secracy. One site i know have a whole team of people who's sole job it is to scan the web for mention of the site and then follow through by finding out who posted it and ensuring that they loose their account. Due to the large comunity and structured / tiered forums for cross site co-operation, infingers are caught and banned accross the range of private trackers.

    In short, if you sqeal once, you get banned on every site you are a member of within hours.

    It's really very easy for a commited fellow to run a tracker and evade eradication by the bumbling authorities, Usually what happens is that people grow up, meet girls and move on. That is the main cause of bit torrent trackers going down, the owners loose interest.

    The second main cause is hardware failure without propper backups of the database.

    The authorities actually account for very few site closures and a torrent tracker database can be gzipped up and change hands in minutes. The Oink's Pink Palace database was distributed amongst lots of individuals in order to keep the comunity alive should for example the police start kicking doors down.

    But when the police start kicking doors down, however out of proportion and stupid that may be, it's just not worth it anymore.

    I still cant believe the lies that are being printed in the media about Oink, I think Peter Ellis will be prosecuted successfully on lesser charges due to the bad press he is recieving now. They are saying that every member (20k) had to pay £5 to invite another member and that it was organised crime at it's most effecient.

    I was a member, i invited several people and there was no such cost involved. You were free to help donate to the costs of hardware and hosting, you were just as free to not pay a penny.

    He bought his own hardware for the site, a cluster of HP DL380's if i recall correctly, he posted pictures and we all dscussed the pro's and conns.

    Oinks pink palace was a ground breaking acheivement in modern, comunity based file distributon.

    So much good,so much could be learned from that experiment but instead let's just make a criminal out of him and sweep it all under the carpet while we keep trying to get people to drive to the shops to buy overpriced CD's and we'll keep working on our crappy DRM ridden pathetic pay per download library that has but a fraction of the choice that it could have, and all at 128Kbps so you will have to pay again for a propper quality version.

  19. Neal 5

    No fears

    Spain, like France and obviously the rest of the EU/World have obviously not been made aware of Seedboxing yet, or fail to understand the process of avoiding rules/laws is far more simple once those laws/rules have been made. Obviously the funding of worldwide terror/drug smuggling or just pure greed crime is far more able to adapt to the modern world than the scaremongering agency of your choice is able to.

    Is there a lesson to be learnt from any of this, which has been taught so many times before, but not learnt from. It's like dealing with an ESN or special needs child, when communicating with our/your law makers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Exactly!

      When you find that most of the serious torrentors are running seed boxes on a load of rented kit, how many people are you going have to haul in to get everyone?

      The space renter, you or me.

      The ISP, for not blocking the traffic.

      The line supplier, BT or Virgin.

      The space hosting company.

      It's called torrent for a reason, no matter what, you're going to get washed away by it!

  20. shay mclachlan

    I guess

    I guess whoever dreamt this up closes their eyes every time they walk past one of those newsstands that are eveywhere in Spain. Thats the only way they won't see the eye watering range and variety of porn mags on display.

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