After 16 years of judicial journey in which they have been jumping from one court to another in Spain, those responsible for the, in its day, very well-known website SeriesYonkis have been definitively acquitted of the intellectual property crimes of which they were accused. Link to movies or series through your page. Although they will have to bear the costs of the entire judicial process, which total around 20,000 euros for each one, those involved can now breathe easy.
The story dates back to 2007, when large international production companies and distributors such as Paramount, Warner Bros. Universal, Disney, Sony and the audiovisual rights company EGEDA, among other entities, began a legal battle against SeriesYonkis and its four accused perpetrators: the creator from the Alberto García Sola website, along with Jordi Tamargo, Alexis Oepfner and David Martínez.
These corporations were asking for prison sentences and up to 550 million euros for the damages caused.
According to the plaintiffs, SeriesYonkis was guilty of a crime under the Penal Code since publishing links that led to movie or series files on download websites such as Megaupload was an act of public communication. However, since the Penal Code did not provide a definition of the act of public communication, these companies resorted to reporting a violation of the Intellectual Property Law.
After going through several courts in Murcia, it was finally the Supreme Court that put an end to the complaints, arguing that the activity of publishing links in which SeriesYonkis was involved (no series or movie files were housed in its servers) was not a crime at the time the site was in operation.
This changed in 2015, with a reform of the Penal Code, precisely, pressured by American interest groups to further limit what is understood as piracy or violation of intellectual property.
As expressed by the defense of the accused, although the ending has been positive for them, there is much to criticize about this historic judicial process for Internet regulations in Spain. And the fact is that a process that has lasted up to 16 years has meant a mental burden for the accused that would justify damage to their mental health, to which is added the fact that the experience has not come free for those from SeriesYonkis : around 20,000 euros in legal costs that they have had to invest during all these years to finance their lawyers, attendance at trials and so on.
The Sinde law
The SeriesYonkis case is closely related to the entry into force on March 6, 2011 of what is known as the Sinde law, which allows the closure or blocking of web pages downloading illegal content subject to copyright. In 2021, SeriesYonkis appeared on the ‘Sinde List’, a blacklist of 122 websites that also included Taringa, PorDescargaDirecta, Vagos, Cinetube or Elite Torrent, to name a few.
Some groups like the Association of Internet Users They harshly criticized the Sinde Law at the time for threatening the fundamental rights of Internet users.
