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[Red Fortress]

Spain gets own variant of SOPA/PIPA:

Just as SOPA opponents in the United States prepare for round two in their battle against far-reaching anti-piracy legislation, it appears that their Spanish counterparts just lost theirs. On Friday, the Spanish government approved the Sustainable Economy Law, (SEL) which enables rights holders to have infringing websites shut down within 10 days after a complaint is filed.

Once a complaint is made, a judge can order ISPs to block access to sites that host copyrighted material or have them shut down entirely. The law, which was officially passed early last year but never implemented, was approved by Spain's new, more conservative government last week and will now be enacted as planned, much to the delight of the film and music industries, as well as other media companies.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...n_websites.php

[Japo]

Yep. The new government is in, but this would have been approved no matter who had won the election. Curiously enough it has been pretty much the first act of the goverment, it will be at least a month until the government finishes announcing what it might or not be planning to possibly do in the future about everything else. It seems there aren't more urgent matters, with unemployment somewhere near 25%. The previous government already had this thing in the works, and the "artists" union got nervous and made sure the new one didn't forget about it. In Spain this is a very powerful union and their agencies are unelected de facto government agencies that collect taxes by themselves (!), taxes that are justified as a priori compensations for piracy or private copies, and which amount for much of the revenue of the music "industry". Just like direct tax handouts gives the state-operated film "industry" all of its revenue, while Spaniards mostly continue refusing to watch Spanish films relatively to American ones, and yet voters seem to agree or shrug when politicians assert that we must "support" (pay huge handouts to) "our" (theirs) film "industry".

Conflict of interest, power corrupts... Been there.

[Japo]

More interested parties:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/1...spain-proposed