Culture minister cites legal handcuffs in SGAE response

Culture Minister Ángeles González-Sinde on Wednesday responded to the crisis engulfing the SGAE copyright-management body. Among the proposals she put forward to prevent a repeat the alleged embezzlement and fraud that has placed the former director of the SGAE's digital arm, José Luis Rodríguez Neri, in custody and prompted the resignation of Teddy Bautista as president are a system of sanctions as well as obligatory public audits.

González-Sinde also pointed to the 1997 law curtailing her ministry's control over the SGAE, saying that it falls to Spain's regions to act as watchdogs over such organizations.

Meanwhile, Congress voted unanimously on Tuesday night to do away with the so-called "digital canon" ? a tax on blank media such as DVDs, CDs and even pen drives or camera phones ? in order to make way for a new levy.

The canon, which was designed to compensate artists who had seen their income shrink thanks to the ease of file sharing and the illegal downloading of music and films, has been extremely unpopular with the public, as well as having seen its legality questioned by the EU.

Tuesday's motion, which was promoted by the opposition Popular Party (PP), was passed with 331 votes in favor and just two abstentions. PP spokesperson José María Lasalle said that the model of the canon "has been exhausted," and had been "overtaken by events."

In October 2010, the European Union Court of Justice ruled that the Spanish digital canon was not in line with EU legislation.

"We can no longer continue to employ an analogue approach to interpret intellectual property rights," the PP said. "We need to find a new balance that makes use of formulas that are not regulated by the digital canon."

Blow for the "Sinde law"

In a separate development, the Barcelona High Court has issued a ruling that flies in the face of the "Sinde law," introduced by Culture Minister Ángeles González-Sinde to combat illegal downloads in Spain by granting powers to an administrative commission to shut down websites who provide access to such content.

The court ruled that the website Indice-web.com was not breaking the intellectual property law (LPI) simply by providing a link to an external website ? in this case file-sharing site Megaupload ? from which copyright-protected material could be downloaded.

"Offering the link does not constitute an act of making the file available," the ruling reads.

If other judges follow a similar line in the future, and decide that such links do not violate the exclusive rights of authors, then the administrative commissions that the "Sinde law" envisages are likely to find that they lack the ability to close down offending sites quickly.

"If a civil servant says that one of these sites is illegal, they will be on the receiving end of a lawsuit the very next day for breach of legal duty, because a number of sentences, both civil and penal, have seen judges follow the legal criteria that links do not infringe on intellectual property," explains lawyer Javier de la Cueva, who defended the Indice-web.com site in the Barcelona case.