b) it's for the people operating/owning "link" sites that exist purely to profit from and facilitate piracy. These people gamble the income from millions or billions of monthly ad impressions are worth it, they don't deserve a free pass.
c) users of such sites are not being targeted, except by the site owners peddling mountains of spyware and affiliate scamware all over their sites
"it's for the people operating/owning "link" sites"
In other words, six years in jail for telling people where they can download possibly infringing copies of copyrighted material? Wow, when you put it that way, it sounds ten times worse.
If this is all true I honestly don't see much wrong with this law. 6 years might seem like a lot for a non-violent crime like this but with the amount of money those sites can make anything less probably wouldn't be much of a deterrent.
"6 years might seem like a lot for a non-violent crime like this but ...". 6 years is a lot for a non-violent crime. Full-stop. It doesn't matter if you like the practice or not.
What happens if you have a legitimate publication and link to a source that happens to also have illegal material ? This opens a can of worms.
Good point. Also, applying the letter of the law here would require Google and other search engines to be prosecuted, because they certainly "...provide links to copyrighted material that is illegally distributed via other websites."
Nobody cares about incidental linking to infringing material. What they care about are streaming sites and file locker sites. SurfTheChannel is a good example, it was an index of links to pretty much any tv show or movie hosted on sites like the former Mega network etc:
"At the site's peak in mid-2009 it generated up to £50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue, and was more popular than Facebook"
Nobody cares about incidental linking to infringing material. What they care about are streaming sites and file locker sites.
File locker sites are not targeted. They're outside Spain anyway. The target are clearly the forums where people posts links to file lockers.
Do you think nobody cares about incidental linking? Just wait and see. What will happen when this law starts being applied? Obvious first move for these forums owners will be putting the sites out or spanish jurisdiction. People will also start to use other less specific forums to post links.
This measure will be useless, but legal monstrosities like "indirect profit" and other vague provisions will still poison the legal system.
So the site was more popular then Facebook, and therefore, we must take it down to protect the business interests of the RIAA and MPAA? Where are all those "vote with your dollar" people now? It sounds to me like people voted.
If they made lots of money, good: they offered a service the public wanted. As far as that basic model goes they added value into the economy.
Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.
Except that those sites are not infringing copyrights. Those sites are just pointing people to the infringing copies. Take the sites away, and the infringing copies continue to exist, and everyone just goes to sites hosted outside the jurisdiction of Spain (or they find a new way to share the links).
b) it's for the people operating/owning "link" sites that exist purely to profit from and facilitate piracy. These people gamble the income from millions or billions of monthly ad impressions are worth it, they don't deserve a free pass.
c) users of such sites are not being targeted, except by the site owners peddling mountains of spyware and affiliate scamware all over their sites