Spain: America's Trojan Horse?

Techdirt had an interesting, if depressing, story the other day:

according to reports about some of the latest Wikileaks State Department cable leaks, it appears that Hollywood and US diplomats were behind the crafting of Spain's newly proposed copyright law. You may recall, of course, that Spain actually has a fairly reasonable copyright law. It says personal, non-commercial, file sharing is okay, and does not seem to agree with the idea that you should blame third parties for actions of their users.

Now put that together with this:

The European Commission is contemplating making Internet providers police their networks to tackle illegal downloads, a highly contested measure which is currently being scrutinised by the European Court of Justice.

Sources close to the Commission claim that the EU executive will try and replicate a Spanish law which forces Internet providers to come down hard on users for making illegal downloads.

It's pretty clear what is going on here: get one or two EU countries to bring in repressive laws that can be cited as precedents, then "harmonise" EU laws so that all European countries do the same.

It emphasises why every country has to fight these kind of neo-colonial impositions by the US copyright industries, because once a crack appears at the national level, the European Commission will be sure to start using it to open up the whole of Europe.

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