Spain Says File Sharing is Legal – Obama Says “Your Wrong”

Posted on 12. May, 2009 by in NEWS

obama 300x205 | Spain Says File Sharing is Legal Obama Says Your WrongWhile President Obama was still Candidate Obama, he won support from a variety of prominent folks in the “free” camp. He secured endorsements from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig – who Cnet.com calls the “doyen of the ‘free-culture’ movement.” Even the US Pirate Party endorsed him.

Then Obama dashed their hopes by appointed a top RIAA lawyer to be third in command at the US Department of Justice. Not good news for the Pirate Party, or any of the above mentioned supporters. Heck, even picking Joe Biden as VP was a snub to the those who hoped for a more progressive stance on copyright law.

Now Obama’s transformation from free-culture savior to copyright lobbyist bulldog appears to be complete. A few months ago the Spanish government ruled that personal use file-sharing is legal and that the sites that host file sharing are protected as long as they don’t directly profit from copyright infringement. The Obama White house has made it clear that they are not happy about this.

According to TorrentFreak, the Whitehouse has charged that Spain has not done enough ”to change the widespread misperception in Spain that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal.” Which is funny, because the Spanish government has said that file-sharing is legal. It’s not a misperception – it’s the law. The US can suggest that it change it’s laws, we can even bully them into submission (not that we would ever do that…) but the fact is, Spain has looked at the issue and decided to allow file sharing within it’s borders.

We’ll have to wait and see how this turns out. It is interesting to see a Western country taking such an accepting view of file-sharing, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to last too long.

For a much more entertaining look at the issue, click here.

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2 Responses to “Spain Says File Sharing is Legal – Obama Says “Your Wrong””

  1. Lance

    14. May, 2009

    and this is one of the ONLY things I agree with Mr. Oboma on

    Marketing people of course will see this as an opportunity, I see it as a pitfall, either you fight it, or you submit to it and morph with it to the outcome that it will become, and try to make that outcome a benefit. I think the outcome of what Scott is suggesting, could in fact be a positive one, however at what cost?
    If you start down the slippery slope of making it ok and acceptable on all levels then where does that leave the owner of the intellectual property that didn’t want this to happen with his property? Where are his rights as the creator and or owner? We have this with programs, as well as movies, artwork, the written word, all over the internet. “Copyright infringement”, simply means that the owner of the work should have the right to allow or not allow this to happen.
    If you make it “OK” or the “accepted norm” how is that going to effect their rights?

    This is what you have to ask yourself, I have absolutely no problem with Torrents making available materials that have been given to them via the proper entities to market for free, these sites could even make money with advertising rather than just run at a loss doing this (which is of course what they were hoping to do with their Amazon Affiliation fee’s) They could do it on a much bigger basis if they were legit business’ rather than fly by night operations working illegally. Myspace is making a killing on advertising because they chose to embrace this concept the correct way.

  2. refe

    14. May, 2009

    MySpace is not making a killing on advertising: http://www.creativedeconstruction.com/2009/05/myspace-music-not-the-silver-bullet-labels-hoped-for