Spain still ranks high as a web pirates' paradise, US says

After three months of confrontation and controversy, Spain's Congress on Tuesday definitively passed the so-called "Sinde law," which aims to combat illegal internet downloading of copyrighted content.

But the legislation, which doesn't even convince the majority of parties involved in the conflict — neither internet users nor the culture industry, which considers the new rules too confused — arrived too late to prevent the US Department of Commerce from once again placing Spain among those countries with which to avoid doing business related to intellectual property (cinema, music, literature and so on). For the fifth year running, the US culture industry wants to place Spain in its feared 301 List, which it will publish in April.

The document it will put forward to the US Department of Commerce, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) described on Tuesday, harshly pointed out that the "music market in Spain has evaporated before the eyes of the government, which turned a blind eye to piracy." While noting a certain optimism because of the passing of the brand-new Sinde law ("after years of inaction, Spain is close to taking an important first step to control internet legislation"), the report points out that in the last five years the Spanish music market has plunged 55 percent. In 2009 and 2010 alone, the drop in sales was 22 percent.

Alongside Spain, the document also places China, Russia, Canada, Italy and Mexico as not very reliable (within, of course, the context of places where record markets exist). The consequences of Spain once more appearing in the list, feared by some, are commercial sanctions and the potential exodus of US companies working here. In order to get off the list, affected countries need to enter into negotiations with the US administration and demonstrate their progress — hence Spain's constant contact with US Vice President Joe Biden. In fact as the cables released by WikiLeaks and analyzed by EL PAÍS showed, the US Embassy decided to find out first-hand how easy it was to download copyright-protected content from Spanish websites back in June 2008. One of the US' main worries is that the Sinde law does not act against peer-to-peer (P2P) websites because they cannot show a profit motive, as an Attorney General's Office circular pointed out in May 2006.

For Antonio Guisasola, president of Promusicae (which represents Spain's music industry), "the notable appearance of the name of Spain among those countries least respectful toward intellectual property in the whole world constitutes a national disgrace, which is no less painful for being repeated and expected."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, as a pirate flag continued fluttering in Spain, Congress on Tuesday passed amendments, such as the Sinde law, to the Economic Sustainability Law, on which the two main parties (the Socialists and the Popular Party, PP) and the CiU Catalan nationalist bloc reached a consensus, with 323 votes for, 19 against and one abstention.

However the controversy will not end there. Internet users have showed themselves to be radically against the reform and promise to go on making noise, as some of them demonstrated last Sunday at the Goya film awards gala.