I have been seeing increasing references in Spanish newspapers to something called La Ley Sinde, and when I read that Álex de la Iglesia, president of the Spanish academy of cinema, had resigned his post in opposition to the law, I finally decided to spend some time figuring out what was going on.
I knew that the law had something to do with Internet piracy, and I assumed that it was strengthening sanctions against the practice of unauthorized (i.e., unpaid) downloading of copyrighted music and film works. What I didn't know was just how inbred in Spanish society the practice of downloading from the Internet was.
A year ago, an article in the Los Angeles Times ("In Spain, Internet Piracy is Part of the Culture") provoked heated controversy among Spanish Internet users who couldn't understand what the fuss was about. The article quoted two middle-aged individuals who routinely download a couple movies a week from the Internet. They didn't feel like pirates, and they weren't, strictly speaking, for in Spain, such downloading is not illegal as long as it is not done for profit.
I didn't know that. Apparently that means that it is not illegal to buy the DVDs of English-language films on sale by street vendors along the beach promenade or at the Sunday market--though it is illegal for the vendors to sell them. So may I rest easier about the copy of The King's Speech loaned to us by some neighbors a week ago that I have enjoyed immensely--twice--all the while feeling guilty because I suspect that it was purchased as a pirated copy for only a couple euros at most and has now provided an evening's entertainment to at least five families?
I learned more from that article and others that I researched. Reportedly there were 12,000 video stores in Spain when I first came here in 2003, but by the end of 2008, there were only 3,000. That rings true--there was just a single video rental store in Roquetas, where we first lived, and since we moved to the Torrevieja area we have yet to find one. There are also few cinema houses. There was one in Roquetas, which showed films in their original version (i.e., not dubbed into Spanish) for a time, but it soon abandoned that practice for lack of an audience--we were usually the only two customers on a Sunday afternoon. I guess most people were just downloading the original version from the Internet instead of paying 6 or 8 euros per person for the cinema version.
Even more surprising to me was that Apple's iTunes website apparently doesn't sell movies or television shows in Spain, though it does in Britain, France, and Germany--and when I read that, I finally realized why I had had so much trouble registering to use iTunes in order to download a free iPhone app several months ago. And while illegal movie downloads grew from 132 million a year to 350 million between 2006 and 2008, DVD sales and rentals fell by 30%. Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton was quoted as saying that Spain was "on the brink" of no longer being a viable home entertainment market for Sony.
We are now beyond the brink, according to a recent article in El Pais, which asserts that for the fourth year in a row, Spain is expected to be on a U.S. Department of Commerce blacklist of countries with which U.S. firms should not engage in business involving intellectual property. This article appeared in the same issue reporting on the final passage of La Ley Sinde, which is named after Spain's minister of culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, who is also a screenwriter and film director. The law is still controversial, since some see it simply as buckling under to U.S. commercial interests and to those who refuse to recognize the "new marketing model" of the Internet. I see it differently, as I come from a tradition and make my living in a profession that acknowledges some monetary value for the work of writers, performers, and other creative artists. I think the law is rather mild anyway. As near as I can figure out, it creates a panel to hear cases against Internet sites allowing downloads and empowers a judge to close such sites. No provisions against the downloaders or the sellers of copies.
I still feel guilty about watching a copy of The King's Speech that may have been illegal, even though I did not break a Spanish law. I would have been happy to go into a store and rent an authorized copy of the original version. I would have been even happier to be able to see the film in a movie theater. But the problem remains that films in Spain are dubbed into Spanish. Can you imagine watching and listening to The King's Speech in Spanish?
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