Officials Receive Requests To Censor 79 Websites Under Spain's SOPA-Like Sinde Law

from the censorhsip-is-fun dept

Thanks to tremendous pressure from the US entertainment industry and the US government, Spain passed the Sinde law, putting in place a Spanish version of SOPA that creates a blacklist of naughty sites to be burned at the stake... or, failing that, have access blocked by ISPs. The Sinde law has been in effect for a month, and Spain's Ministry of Culture has admitted to receiving over 300 complaints calling for the death of 79 sites. The copyright commission is investigating the allegations and has not yet shut down any sites. Either way, this gives you a sense of the entitlement feeling of many in the industry. Given the chance (and the original SOPA gave them the chance), they will claim all sorts of horrible things about very useful services -- and then order them shut down. We know, for a fact, that takedown systems like the DMCA get regularly abused. Expanding such powers by allowing for the complete closure of sites is something that will be widely abused too. Complaints targeting so many sites upfront certainly suggests that the law itself is quite problematic.

Make no mistake about it. This new law is a censorship law, that allows private parties to make claims that could lead to competitors being knocked offline. The Spanish public was against it, as were many politicians. But the supporters of the bill finally got it through, and the fallout is a big bureaucracy and lots of accusations flying -- accusations that may never be dealt with in a real trial. Letting private companies effectively run a system for censorship, and seeing it being used in action, should worry most people. Unfortunately, "most people" seems to exclude the big copyright industry players and the politicians they love.

Filed Under: abuse, censorship, sinde, sopa, spain

Hacktivist Judo: Musician Exploits New Spanish Law To Overwhelm System With Legitimate Infringement Complaints

from the you-want-infringement?-we'll-show-you-infringement dept

As Techdirt reported earlier this year, Spain's Sinde Law, designed to combat file sharing by blocking sites with allegedly infringing material, has an extremely complex history. It finally went into effect on 1 March, and was immediately met with a clever denial of service attack from a Spanish group with the self-explanatory name "Hackivistas". As TorrentFreak explains:

They encouraged sites to link to a copyrighted track from the artist Eme Navarro, who’s a member of the music rights group SGAE, but critical of the Sinde law.

While Navarro generally publishes his music under a Creative Commons license, he created an "all rights reserved" track specifically for the protest. Thanks to the hacktivist campaign hundreds of websites are now linking to this copyrighted song without permission, and Navarro reported a first batch of sites to the Ministry of Culture early this morning.

As a result, the commission tasked with reviewing all the requests will be overloaded with complaints. All the reported sites have to be processed on order of arrival, so the protest will significantly slow down this review process.

As well as gumming up the legal machinery for a while, this action is designed to obtain some much-needed details about how the Sinde Law will work in practice:

"Nobody knows how they will shut down websites. We suspect that they will ask Spanish companies hosting the websites to shut them down, and that Spanish service providers will block websites that are hosted outside of Spain."

This is pretty extraordinary. How can the Spanish government claim any legitimacy for a law that was not only brought in at the behest of a foreign power, but was rammed through the legislative process in such a way that those most affected by it -- the Spanish people -- still have no idea how it will be implemented?

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Filed Under: copyright, denial of service, hactivism, sinde, spain

US State Dept: Don't Censor The Internet! Unless We Order You To, As We Did In Spain...

from the sing-a-song-of-hypocrisy dept

We've discussed how the State Department, and Hillary Clinton in particular, have been spending a lot of time talking up the importance of internet freedom, and speaking out against countries that censor the internet. That even resulted in Joe Biden's unintentionally hilarious explanation of why internet censorship is horrible... while he supports internet censorship at home.

It seems like there's a real disconnect in our government, however, when the censorship is couched in the word "copyright." We just wrote about how Spain adopted its SOPA-like law this week, despite widespread public outrage. We had noted that the US State Department was a major force behind the bill, and (no surprise) more news has leaked that there was more of the same behind this new decision to adopt the Sinde Law. It's been leaked that, just last month, State Department officials threatened the Spanish government that if it didn't pass the law, there would be repercussions. This was a letter from US ambassador Alan Solomont to the outgoing Spanish government, sent December 12th, in which he talked about "promises" made to the US government:

"The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain... The government of Spain made commitments to the rights owners and to the US government. Spain can not afford to see their credibility questioned on this issue."

Stunning. Because, in actuality, the commitment the Spanish government has is to its own citizens -- who are very much against the bill. The only thing that raises questions about Spain's "credibility" is caving to US diplomatic pressure to censor the internet.

Meanwhile, if we want to talk "credibility," the US State Department is increasingly losing its credibility on this issue. How can any diplomat, with a straight face, go public talking about internet freedom and being against censorship, when the State Department demanded Spain pass a law that allows for censoring the internet?

Filed Under: alan solomont, censorship, free speech, hypocrisy, internet freedom, sinde, spain, state department

Spanish Government Adopts Its Own Version Of SOPA: Sinde Law Approved

from the there-goes-a-reasonable-one dept

Well, this is unfortunate. Spain has been one of the few remaining countries that had fairly reasonable copyright laws. It was clear that liability is on the actual party doing the infringing, rather than third party service providers, which is why time and time again, Spanish courts found various tool providers to be legal when sued by the entertainment industry. Of course, this has driven the entertainment industry absolutely crazy. We've been hearing stories for years about how the entertainment industry was dead in Spain because of the widespread infringement. Just last month, MPAA boss Chris Dodd insisted that the film industry in Spain was "gone" because of infringement. As we pointed out, Dodd was making this up. The Spanish film industry is doing quite well and producing more movies than in the past.

However, the entertainment industry has been pushing this message about how infringement has killed the entire industry in Spain to US politicians and diplomats, leading the US State Department to go ballistic in Spain, demanding that the country change its copyright laws to please Hollywood. While this had been assumed ever since the new legislation was introduced, some of the State Department cables leaked via Wikileaks confirmed the US's deep involvement in pressuring the Spanish government to change its laws.

The revelation that this was really a Hollywood-driven law ramped up public opposition to the bill, and actually delayed it for about a year. The whole situation so pissed off people all around Spain, that even the head of the Spanish Film Academy quit that position to protest how bad the new law was, and how it was anti-consumer.

A month ago, a bunch of press reports suggested that the law, called the Sinde Law, after Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, had been killed. However, many others pointed out that the issue had really just been punted to the incoming government, which appears to have wasted almost no time in approving the Sinde Law and putting in place a totally backwards and unnecessary law that was pushed by Hollywood by misleading people about the state of the Spanish film market. This, despite the fact that analysis from some economists determined that the bill would be very bad for consumers and artists alike (though it might help big studios in Hollywood).

All in all this is a pretty shameful sell out by the Spanish government to Hollywood. Even worse, Spanish Deputy PM Soraya Saenz de Santamaria is either naive or clueless in suggesting that this will "boost our cultural industries." It won't. It's actually about getting money away from Spanish cultural industries (which, again, are making more movies than ever) and sending it to Hollywood instead. Shameful.

Filed Under: copyright, liability, sinde, spain