Spanish Gov't Moves Forward On New Law To Make File Sharing And Links Sites Illegal
from the that-didn't-last-long dept
A bunch of free culture sites got pretty excited recently when a Spanish court ruled that file sharing sites, as well as links sites, weren't illegal. Of course, we noted this was hardly a new thing. Spanish courts had already made similar rulings in the past. In fact, the timing of this ruling seemed particularly bad, since we'd noted a few months ago that there were proposals being pushed to change copyright law in Spain. So it should come as little surprise that just days after that last ruling, the gov't has started moving forward with getting the new law approved, and many expect it will be in place within a few months.The new law sounds particularly bad as well. It would set up a governmental bureaucracy that could simply denounce any site as illegal, if it feels that it offers links to infringing content. Once "denounced," the Spanish high court would get a grand total of four days to determine if the site should be shut down -- and the only reason why it would be allowed to not shut the site down would be if there were clear concerns about freedom of expression. Basically, if the gov't feels a site has too many "unauthorized" links, it gets shut down with minimal review. So much for a more balanced approach to copyright law.
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Filed Under: copyright, file sharing, legal, p2p, spain
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so when do we start teh world wide revolution?
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Interesting
The copyright nazis are almost as bad as the drink nazis who try to go after bars because a drunk drinks too much and drives him or herself home.
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though you're probably right on the last one.
which is part of why so few countries have blanket freedom of speech. (and an aweful lot of even the more liberal ones have censors as an official part of the government structure)
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Actually, holocaust denial is a perfect example of the absurdities that censorship leads to. I don't deny the holocaust, but I'm also against of a group of people forbidding another group of people denying it for no other reason than that they can. There is concrete evidence that the holocaust happened. What evidence do the holocaust deniers have to support their argument? None, of course. And if people would stop conflating hard facts with opinions, then all the leverage of the holocaust deniers, or, for that matter, of all manipulators and people spreading disinformation would go up in a puff of smoke.
If the standard operating procedure for all these kinds of debates would be based around telling the other guy "Show me the proof!", then there would be no need for any kind of censorship. In reality, almost nobody starts with "Show me the proof!". Most of the people start with "If you say so, then you must be speaking the truth." That grants fact status to any and all opinions, which is much, much worse than you could imagine. I'll stop here because this has the potential to evolve in a novella-length diatribe and I don't have the time for it right now and most of the other readers probably don't have the stomach for reading it either.
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huh
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But anyway. You get the point. Corporations are the lawless criminals that are actual committing crimes, copyright infringement is not a crime! yet...
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so what are you trying to say TAM
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The future...
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Gets worse.
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