A Spanish Judge has ruled that as long as pirated downloads are not for profit, then it is legal in Spain to do so.
The Spanish equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA sued an eDonkey 2000 P2P website and other named individuals for piracy, and instead got a verdict that they did not expect - namely that as long as the people who downloaded the copyrighted material did not go out to seek a profit from these "ill-gotten" gains, then they aren't technically breaking any laws. This is surely the first time such a judgement has been handed down, and it now puts the onus on the content owners to prove that money was lost. The only way they can do this is to somehow prove that had the pirated material not being available, the downloaders should have purchased the content instead. This is almost impossible to prove.
The Spanish equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA sued an eDonkey 2000 P2P website and other named individuals for piracy, and instead got a verdict that they did not expect - namely that as long as the people who downloaded the copyrighted material did not go out to seek a profit from these "ill-gotten" gains, then they aren't technically breaking any laws. This is surely the first time such a judgement has been handed down, and it now puts the onus on the content owners to prove that money was lost. The only way they can do this is to somehow prove that had the pirated material not being available, the downloaders should have purchased the content instead. This is almost impossible to prove.
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