Poor Barack Obama, getting all hung up on the fact that Spanish courts recently ruled that personal file-sharing is legal, and that file-sharing sites that don’t profit from copyright infringement are also protected under the law. As anyone with an internet connection knows, the United States is all like “Dude, you can’t download that torrent of the new Wolverine movie,” and they feel that Spain should adopt similar laws.
Why the big push on anti-piracy laws for Spain and not other foreign countries? Well, according to Torrent Freak, “Spain has one of the worst file-sharing problems in the world. The U.S. claims it is consistently among the top five worst countries in terms of overall downloads and that it regularly takes the top position for movie downloads per capita.” Damn, I guess Spaniards love Hugh Jackman too. The music industry is also suffering in Spain, with around two billion tracks illegally downloaded in 2008, up 80% from 2007.
Obama is hoping Spain will curb illegal file-sharing by “…includ[ing] an agreement between ISPs and copyright holders to prevent infringing content [from] being available on the Internet and should include ‘the immediate and effective implementation of graduated response three strikes procedures.’” Basically what all that legal bullshit boils down to is that Obama wants Spain to change their laws supporting file-sharing and punish citizens through a “three strikes procedure.” Come on, Barack, you mean to tell me that all the music on your iPod was paid for? I sent you a Mediafire link to the Veckatimest leak back in March, dude!
