With all the the media frenzy over the sentence passed down to the Pirate Bay Four (not to mention the growing frenzy over the alleged bias of trial judge Tomas Norstrum on the grounds that he is pro-copyright – he is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and Swedish Association For The Protection of Industrial Property) readers may have missed a similar story from further south in Europe where a Spanish court has passed a jail sentence on a defendant for running a website that provided links to unlicensed music content.
In an earlier case a Spanish court had held that Spain’s copyright laws did not cover websites that enable others to infringe – unless they were profit-making. Now a court has ruled that whilst Adrian Gomez Llorente did not directly make money from pay-per-download fees or host content, he did make a profit from his website through advertising and SMS services and thus was guilty of infringing. Llorente received six months in jail and a 4,900 euro fine for operating his website. As Llorente has no prior criminal record it seems unlikely that he will actually be serving time in prison.
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