On December 16, search engine giant Google started excluding stories from Spanish news media on its Google News service. The Californian internet company has taken the decision in the wake of the so-called ‘Google tax’, which forms part of the Spanish government’s new Copyright Act, due to go into force on January 1, 2015. The…
Competition and collecting societies: a special application of European legal doctrine in Spain. “It seems to utilise the previous methods in a forced manner, even though those methods had led to very different conclusions on a European level.” In a recent decision by the Spanish Market and Competition Commission (CNMC), once again penalising SGAE with…
“With respect to the current stunted reform, the new legislation once again touches on past issues that were never properly resolved, and I am afraid that this is still the case now. The first is the zombie issue of private copying and the second salient point of the reform is piracy. Other reforms regard the…
“A clear intention to solve some of the most disturbing problems in Spanish IP.” On February 14th, the Spanish Government approved a bill to amend the law of intellectual property (TRLPI). The bill is currently in its parliamentary proceedings. It is a “patchwork” reform bill dealing with very different topics, some more necessary than others, and…
Breaking news. More than a year after Congress repealed the private copying levy, the Spanish Government agreed yesterday to begin paying taxes on blank media such as DVDs, CDs, pen drives and camera phones through a budget allotment. The Ministry of Culture would be in charged of determining each year how much should be allotted…
A greatest hits album by Spanish pop star Luz Casal is the subject of the first case to be brought before the Intellectual Property Commission, the body created by the so-called Sinde anti-downloading law, aimed at combating copyright violations on the internet. AGEDI, the collecting society that represents Spain’s phonographic producers, has filed a complaint…
By Raquel Xalabarder, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya “This ruling is very good news for the recent doctrinal attempts to bring some flexibility in the way copyright laws are being interpreted and applied. It is difficult to predict the impact that this ruling may have in successive case law, but it is certainly an important milestone…
Spain’s newly elected Partido Popular has recently implemented the controversial Regulation that develops the Intellectual Property disposition contained in the Law for Economic Sustainability (Ley de Economía Sostenible), informally known as the Sinde law (Ley Sinde), after outgoing Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. The main aim of the so-called Law is to protect the owners, creators…
Not a day had elapsed since elections to the board of directors at the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), Spain’s largest copyright collecting society, when civil guard officers suddenly raided its headquarters at Palacio de Longoria, in downtown Madrid last July 1. Workers were quickly sent out of the landmark modernist building, following…
In a somewhat surprising move, on 12 July 2011 the lower house of the Spanish Parliament urged the Government to abolish the so-called “canon digital” (the private copying levy on digital media) and replace it by a “less arbitrary and indiscriminate system” that provide rightsholders with a “fair and equitable remuneration based on the effective…
