This is kind of the first day before the next day

In the last weeks there was some writting, tweeting and writting on Spain about a new law being pushed to allow government to order the close down of a site in case the site was violaiting copyright law. There was plenty of buzz about it. It was kind of annoying to find out that among the supporters of that law where claiming that the ones that oppose to it where in fact supporint piracy. It don't think at all that was the case: there is already law that protects copyright here in Spain, simply some people wanted to bypass that law and avoid settle the claims at court. In other words they just wanted to have full control and power whenever they wanted.

That was nothing specially new, because that same kind of powers already exist in the DMCA law at USA. (I could be pretty wrong about what I have just written about DMCA, but just click on the link and read about it yourself). So this week, the copyright holders have asked to Blogger to close down all the sites they consider are violating the law. So this week was the great Music Blogger shutdown!!

There are plenty of sites that (since they just linked full album downloads) were very obviously breaking the law. I am not going to justify them. They got what they were risking to get. But many other sites where just simply promoting new music. They just added a a few mp3 as sample and just for a temporary time. Some of those where shut down also. Then there was this strange legal sitiuation: some sites where promoting records that were out of print (old vynil records, casettes). Yeah, they were letting people download music, but was there really a copyright holder there? What is the guilt to promote something that their own owner is not printing any longer? I hope that those sites get indulted.

Well, and since today is the day, let's promote this very interesting documentary on copyright and music:

Hum... Ah, the motto of the whole post is: this same shit will happen here in Spain. There will be plenty of arbitrary shut downs. Because somehow artists just see Internet as an evilish place, and they just want to return back to the times where they had to pay to play on the radio, and beg for good reviews on the press. I just give a shit about them. Most of those Spanish musicians do not deserve even being heard, much less being pirated.

12 February 2010