Hollywood studios ponder abandoning Spanish DVD market because of piracy

Movie piracy is common practice in Spain. Well, it is common practice throughout countries where a high percentage of the population has broad banded connections to the Internet. But Spain is especially notorious for it. Against a European average of 15% of people sharing files without the consent of rights holders, the statistic for Spain is 30%.

In an interview with the LA Times, Sony’s Picture Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said: "People are downloading movies in such large quantities that Spain is on the brink of no longer being a viable home entertainment market for us."

According to a report on Internet piracy by the French firm TERA, quoted by The Guardian, DVD sales in Spain have plummeted six times as fast as in the United Kingdom. The size of the market, as a result, is only about ten per cent that of Germany or the UK.

"There has never been a clear message here that downloading is piracy,” says Antonio Guisasola of Promusicae, a music rights group. Indeed, the common thread of reasoning by courts is that non-commercial file sharing is not unlawful. But neither is there strong legal action against commercial file sharing platforms and illegal DVD streaming sites. Policy makers are now trying to counter this trend, as culture minister Ángeles González-Sinde sent a bill to parliament last week that would allow the government to close down sites that illegally market content. "The idea is to act against those websites that try to make money out of other people's creativity," a source in the ministry said. "There is no attempt to impose any control on what Internet users themselves do, unlike in France or England."

6 April 2010