The Constitutional Court has made final the acquittal of the founders of the SeriesYonkis download portal, putting an end to a criminal battle promoted by large production companies for almost two decades. The second chamber of the guarantee court has unanimously rejected the appeal that large companies such as Warner or the Producers’ Rights Management Entity against the decision of the Murcia courts to acquit the former managers of the platform to watch series, a case in which they faced prison requests and million-dollar fines from the Prosecutor’s Office for crimes against intellectual property.
The SeriesYonkis website and its sister site VideosYonkis opened more than 15 years ago and became the main reference for download pages to watch series and movies without going to traditional platforms or paying to watch them. The producers of the sector, as happened with other pages, then initiated criminal lawsuits that ended in acquittals: until 2015 the law did not sanction the act of linking, from a website like SeriesYonkis, to other websites or platforms that allowed downloading.
The trial held in the Region of Murcia marked the way for other processes, such as the trial in Barcelona against those responsible for SeriesLy, and acquitted the former responsible for the page. “There is no evidence that they were aware of the illicit origin of the information to which they referred or that it infringed any right,” said those first sentences, and nor that “no one was aware of the illegality of the activities carried out by the page.”
The judicial process included requests for up to three years in prison by the Prosecutor’s Office for those responsible for SeriesYonkis and requests for hundreds of millions of euros in compensation by the production companies that declared themselves affected by their activity. The Public Ministry claimed 167 million in compensation and the Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management Entity (EGEDA) rose to 546 million.
The second chamber of the Constitutional Court, as elDiario.es has learned from court sources, has unanimously decided this Monday to reject the appeals that the accusations had presented against the acquittal sentence. Conservatives and progressives have understood, as the courts of the Region of Murcia previously said, that there was no violation of the right to intellectual property.
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