Intellectual Property Law

Not-So-Gentle Persuasion: US Bullies Spain into Proposed Website Blocking Law

By gwen

It?s no secret that the US government has used its annual Special 301 Report to intimidate other countries into adopting more stringent copyright and patent laws by singling out particular countries for their "bad" intellectual property policies, and naming them on a tiered set of "watch lists". Listing results in heightened political pressure and in some cases, the potential for trade sanctions, which encourages foreign trading partners to change their laws to mirror those in the US. But now some of the cables provided by WikiLeaks to Spanish newspaper El Pais confirm that the US government has pushed other countries to adopt measures that go beyond US law, unleashing the fury of Spanish Internet users.

A set of cables reported on by El Pais make clear that the US government played a key role in Spain?s controversial website blocking law ? the 2009 Sustainable Economy Bill, which the Spanish government is now trying to sneak it through a Committee in a pre-holiday session on 21st December. (Spanish readers, please see Action you can take below).

El Pais reports that in February 2008 the US government threatened to put Spain on the annual Special 301 Watch List issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative unless the new Spanish government announced new measures to address Internet piracy, including a law that requires ISPs to terminate the Internet access of subscribers accused three times of file sharing - like the French ?HADOPI? Three Strikes law.

In a February 2008 cable, the US Embassy in Madrid stated that:

?We propose to tell the new government that Spain will appear on the Watch List if it does not do three things by October 2008. First, issue a [Government of Spain] announcement stating that internet piracy is illegal, and that the copyright levy system does not compensate creators for copyrighted material acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing. Second, amend the 2006 ?circular? that is widely interpreted in Spain as saying that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. Third, announce that the GoS will adopt measures along the lines of the French and/or UK proposals aimed at curbing Internet piracy by the summer of 2009.?

Let?s be clear what this means; a US official apparently pressured the government of Spain to adopt novel and untested legislative measures that have never been proposed in the US Congress, and as the other cables published by El Pais show, did so at the request of US IP rightsholders.

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Full post as published by Electronic Freedom Foundation - Deep Links on December 17, 2010 (boomark / email).