Spanish Judge Rules Not-For-Profit P2P is Legal

[p2p rules]

First time a judge in the country has clearly stated that "P2P itself does not violate any rights," says attorney Carlos Almeida-Sanchez.

Spain, though part of Europe, seems to be worlds apart as the only country that has realized the difference between piracy and illegal file-sharing.

For Raul N. Orejuda Garcia, Magistrate Court judge of Mercantile number 7, ruled recently that "P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, does not violate, in principle, any right protected by the Intellectual Property Law."

In particular, he said that P2P transfers are not one of the "clear and specific behaviors that the law forbids, in particular reproduction, distribution and public communication without authorization."

The case was part of a suit brought by a coalition of the country’s entertainment industry against eD2K website elrincondejesus, the owner of which rightly pointed out that it only provided links to content much like Google or any of the other search engines out there.

“As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now)," he said. "I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

Read the rest of the article on zeropaid.