SPAIN: Reform of the Criminal Code. The latest progress in combating the digital piracy

On 30 May the Organic Law 7/2015 reforming the Spanish Criminal Code is to be passed introducing important novelties in the regulation of intellectual property crimes.

The reform coming into force on 1 July 2015 removes the legal uncertainty in the definition of the crime from the behaviour of owners of file sharing sites. This has been possible by removing one of the most difficult issue for complainants: the profit motive. From the effective day of the new regulation, complainants are not required to prove the profit motive of the accused for the crime to be accepted. It will be enough to prove that offenders obtain any kind of “direct or indirect benefit” by sharing files.

The new regulation also considers penalties and sanctions for crime responsibles, as well as injunctions, currently included in the Intellectual Property Law, such as the withdrawal of the website with infringing contents, the Internet service interruption and the blocking of websites.

Following the recent reform of the Intellectual Property Law and convicting sentences such as the one imposed on the Youkioske website and the sentence to block downloads from The Pirate Bay, there is no doubt that the reform of the Criminal Code passing and coming into force will decrease dramatically the infringing activity of file sharing websites. Beyond that, only time will clear whether these actions have proved enough to prevent infringing activity in a volatile, dynamic and vertiginous environment as the digital piracy.