Another SGAE

It has been clear for a long time now that the management of copyright laws needs to be completely revised, and the breaking up of an alleged corrupt network that has seen the bosses of rights-management body SGAE implicated in crimes of embezzlement and fraud has given the issue urgency.

This is not just about keeping corruption out of business, but also because authors must have the means to defend their legitimate rights, via transparent mechanisms both in terms of their creation and their management. It would make no sense to approve a purge of responsibilities only to weaken the already difficult task of managing intellectual property in the new world of technology.

The abuses and defects of the current system had been documented by public bodies that were none too sympathetic to lyrical discourse on piracy. Now the current managers of SGAE have a huge task ahead of them. They must bring about order and inspire confidence. One of the most urgent tasks should be making a change to the electoral system, which the very judge who is in charge of the fraud case has depicted as, at best, obscure, given that it grants a vote to just 8,000 of its 100,000 members.

It seems obvious to say that there was a complete failure to provide safeguards on the part of the government, which has taken refuge in excuses about the indirect nature of its authority over SGAE in order to elude responsibility. The government has neglected to enact an essential revision of the Intellectual Property Law, which needs more than simply bringing up to date. The majority of the parliamentary groups this week called on the culture minister, Ángeles González-Sinde, to introduce major reforms to the law.

That same neglect has caused situations like the one we have seen this week. In February, the ruling Socialists secured the support of the opposition Popular Party (PP) to pursue the so-called "Sinde law," in exchange for a reform to the digital canon (a tax on blank media such as DVDs and CDs) in order to adapt it to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, which had rejected the tax considering it to be abusive given that public and private companies were forced to pay it. What's more, the High Court ruled that the ministerial order that established the tariffs was "fundamentally flawed."

Despite all of that, the government did not make the amendment in time and the PP forwarded a motion this week, which all of the parties voted in favor of ? including the Socialists ? that called for the canon to be replaced with "other, less arbitrary formulas" of remuneration.

The grotesque part of the matter is that the Socialists have interpreted that proposition as the necessary revision of the canon, while the PP consider it to mean its abolition. To the neglect of the Socialists we must add the demagoguery of the PP, which has not come up with any alternatives of its own. One of the issues that the PP must clear up is what will happen with private copies if all types of compensation disappear ? if this is the case in the Anglo-Saxon world, it's precisely because making private copies is not permitted. Changes in digital usage mean that laws quickly become obsolete, and the parties, above all if they are in government, must respond to this.