Spanish Ruling on Non-Commercial File Sharing

A Spanish judge, Raul N. García Orejudo, has ruled that linking to copyrighted material is not illegal in SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) vs. Jesus Guerra over the link site elrincondejesus.com.

Stan Schroeder of Mashable summarizes the proceedings:

First, he denied SGAE’s request to shut down Guerra’s site in June, saying that “P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law.”

Now, he decided that “offering an index of links and/or linking to copyright material is not the same as distribution.” His decision was largely based on the fact that Guerra doesn’t make any direct or indirect profits off the site.

TorrentFreak translates part of the judgment (my Spanish is horrible),

“P2P networks are mere conduits for the transmission of data between Internet users, and on this basis they do not infringe rights protected by Intellectual Property laws,” he declared. Therefore, if an individual uses P2P networks like eDonkey or BitTorrent to obtain copyright material for non-profit reasons, the act is completely legal.

Interesting ruling in the backdrop of the Google exec case in Italy.