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On 21 December 2010 the Spanish Congress rejected a controversial bill aimed at protecting intellectual property rightsholders from Internet downloaders. All of the main Spanish parties, except for Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Socialist Party rejected the so-called Sinde Bill, named after Culture Minister Ángeles González-Sinde. The draft legislation would have set up a government commission which would have then provided courts with details of websites offering access to copyright-protected material, such as music, movies, video games or software. A judge could then have ordered...

At its meeting on 28 October 2010, the Spanish National Competition Commission (CNC) approved the merger between TV channels Telecinco and Cuatro subject to the commitments given by Mediaset’s channel last 19 October 2010 by stating that they have addressed the competition concerns identified. On 28 April 2010 Telecinco had reported to the CNC its planned acquisition of Cuatro. This concentration had been previously subject to a referral by the European Commission, which considered that the CNC was the authority best placed to carry out the analysis. The CNC Council decided on 30 June 2010 to move...

In June 2008, the private Spanish television broadcaster, Telecinco, filed a lawsuit before the courts in Madrid against YouTube for illegally and without authorisation communicating to the public content produced by Telecinco. YouTube retorted that it merely acts as an intermediary between users uploading videos and users receiving them and does not control the content. On 20 September 2010, Madrid’s Mercantile Court number 7 rejected the lawsuit filed by Telecinco against the Internet video service provider YouTube, in which it was held that the content included on the latter’s website did not...

On 21 October 2010 the European Court of Justice rendered its judgement in case C-467/08 Padawan v SGAE, calling the current application of Spanish private copying levy into question. The judgment maintains that the Spanish private copying levy is abusive and that it does not meet with what Directive 2001/29/EC establishes. The Court ruled that the levy should only be charged on individuals, but not legal entities, companies or national authorities, which should be exempted. Firstly it should be clarified, as opposed to what has been implied in the media, that the ruling of the European Court of...

On 24 June 2010, the European Commission issued a set of reasoned opinions to 12 member states (Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, and Slovenia) requesting that they proceed with updating their national broadcasting legislation in order to bring it into compliance with the Audiovisual Media Service (AVMS) Directive. The Directive, which replaced the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989 (as amended), was adopted in December 1997 with the intention of bringing the EU’s broadcasting rules up to speed with the digital age. The...