Spanish judge: P2P sites not illegal in principle

Attempts to reduce file-sharing by having torrent sites taken down by court order have met with little success in Spain. Spanish courts have a tradition of ruling that sites only linking to content that infringes copyright are not illegal, as long as these sites do not make direct profits based on their services.

In a recent lawsuit filed to order a file-sharing site to stop, the judge ruled that: “P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law.” The court further said that uploading a file to Emule is not an act of reproduction.

The Spanish Intellectual Property Act requires a distinct medium that can be associated with the distribution, a website for example. As P2P does not require a specific website, such a medium does not exist.

While the court could not rule out that public distribution would have occurred, it is hard to prove. Sharing could have happened with just one person.