Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011. The debate and the experiment it describes as happening “today” reflect that moment. The Sinde law’s implementing rules came into force in 2012, and Spain’s copyright enforcement rules have been reformed since.
Intellectual property lawyer David Bravo has shown the film industry that the Sinde law (Spain’s law for shutting down websites that link to pirated content) is “useless” and ineffective. Through an experiment under the hashtag #tablasinde, in which he asked Twitter users to take part, he showed that in the time it takes to shut down one download-link site, another 20 can be created. In this particular case, using nothing but Google Docs, they managed to create 20 documents with hundreds of download links.
This is a major blow to the industry, which keeps up its fight, probably down the wrong road, because it is trying to hold on to a business model that may have become outdated with the arrival of the internet.
We won’t play the “double standards” game. While it’s true that the internet’s “everything for free” isn’t a model to follow either, the Sinde law aims to put an end to something it will never achieve, and by now they should have accepted that.
Nor does it help the Sinde law that we Spaniards already know how it has been run: the people who wanted to stamp out piracy were pirates themselves.
Perhaps the film industry just can’t see reality. Its enemy isn’t the user who downloads, but whoever gives it false expectations by making it believe those downloads can be stopped so the industry can go on earning what it used to. Nothing could be further from reality.
And there’s certainly no worse enemy than a bad image. Today, when people talk about the Sinde law, we associate it with a certain Teddy Bautista (former head of the SGAE, Spain’s authors’ rights society) and company, who, under the pretext of collecting money for the industry, deceived their own colleagues and the industry itself in pursuit of their own gain.
The longer this industry takes to forget about the Sinde law and spend its time working out an alternative business model, the more money and time it will lose, because, as was shown today, any tool on the internet can be turned into a download site.
Another thing the industry needs to keep in mind, as in any other business, is that it has to listen to the user (the customer). If it keeps its ears open, it will hear that users are saying “NO” to the Sinde law this time, while remaining open to new proposals. That’s very positive, and at the same time something the industry is making very little of, as it’s putting 100% of its energy into going after users and 0% into studying and proposing other models.
That’s my opinion.
Featured image: Manuel Martín, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
