Spanish Development

[GhostShip]

This does not look good 

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/06/27/1696993.htm

A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use.
The legislation, approved by Congress on Thursday, toughens previous provisions. An early May circular from Spain's fiscal general del estado, or chief prosecutor, allowed downloads for purely personal use.

Now Spaniards caught grabbing content from, say, eMule, will have to reimburse rights holders for losses --- although such losses will be difficult for authorities to track.
But the government is going after Internet service providers; it's a criminal offense for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading.

The law also introduces a small tax to be levied on all blank media --- from a blank CD to mobile phones and even a memory stick. Computer hard disks and ADSL lines have been left out of the legislation despite their widespread use for illegally copying music and films. The money collected will be paid back to the owner of the copyright.
Spain's greater antipiracy clarity received a thumbs-up from the Motion Picture Assn.

"Compared to some European countries, Spain has some way to go in enforcement," said Duncan Hudson,
"But the new intellectual property law is a definite step forward, placing obligations for instance on ISPs to provide information.
Hopefully, it will help us to get some injunctions," he added.

So lets take stock here, its illegal to download copyright material in Spain now, they will chase the isp to obtain your name as is the normal practice elsewhere if they pick you out of the other million users, and then they want you to pay a backdoor "fine/levy" even if your not an internet user it seems, to pay for the content perhaps a second or third time, nice deal the consumer has in spain it seems, corruption seems to permate most countries these days.

[SamSeeSam]

This is bad..
But what exactly are they calling unauthorised?

[GhostShip]

"Unauthorised" is their term for copyrighted material, it will not of course apply to files shared by the rights holder themselves or non copyrighted material.

[SamSeeSam]

Losses... what exactly is meant by that ? (difficult for authorities to track)
That tax that is going to be levied, to which copyright owner is it going to be paid?
Why would ISP's facilitae downloading? They don't like it do they, plus, won't that affect their revenues, this act, I mean Users will opt for lesser speeds, hence lesser money for them?