Spain: prepay mobiles, filesharing websites threatened with closure

Maybe EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding wasn’t completely wide of the mark when she warned Spain over internet disconnections. Although the Spanish government says it has dismissed the idea of disconnecting individuals caught downloading illegal content from the internet, it has come up with new ways of severing communications services.

An estimated 3-4 million people in Spain had their phones disconnected this week, as the deadline ran out for owners of pay-as-you-go mobiles to register their devices. The pre-pay clampdown was not prompted by online piracy, but was a response to the terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004, in which such phones were used to activate bombs on several trains in Madrid with deadly effect.

Separately, the Ley de Economia Sostenible (Sustainable Economy Law) currently in front of the Spanish parliament would allow the authorities to take down any website accused of providing access to copyright protected material online, for example, by linking to a BitTorrent site.

The draft legislation, supposedly in final form, includes several controversial amendments aimed at tackling online piracy. Previously, Article 8.1 of the Law of Services of the Information Society (LSSI) named four cases for restricting access to the Internet: protecting public order, criminal investigation, public security and national defence, protection of public health, respect for dignity of the person and the principle of nondiscrimination, and protection of youth and childhood (yes, it looks like more than four to me too).

Now there is an additional case for restricting internet access – namely “safeguarding intellectual property rights”. In addition, a new paragraph introduced into the Article would give “competent bodies” the powers to require operators to identify the person or persons accused of copyright violation. The target is not the consumer, however, but the websites providing links to the copyrighted material, which could be taken down without having their day in court, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

This would be a pretty radical change in Spanish law. “The reason there has been such a growth in torrent sites in Spain is because the local courts have ruled time and again that if profits aren’t made directly from copyright infringements, BitTorrent sites are perfectly legal,” writes blogger enigmax.

There has been what is described as a “massive and organized reaction… within the online community”, the culmination of which is a manifesto called “In Defense of Fundamental Internet Rights” drafted by a group of journalists, bloggers and online celebrities.

Tags: file sharing, piracy, Spain