Series Yonkis beats the big production companies twice in the Constitutional Court, although it pays dearly

Let’s imagine what the life of the four accused has been like. responsible at the time for the popular download site Junkies Series, and finally acquitted on November 4 in the Constitutional Court, after 16 years of judicial process.

All of them are now over forty years old, some have gotten married and have sons and daughters, a mortgaged house, a stable job. All this time they have lived with a sword over their heads, pending the payment of their lawyers, the decisions of courts and tribunals, fearful of ruin because they were accused in 2007 of hackers when what they did, then, It was not a crime.

Not one, but two sentences of the Second Chamber of the Constitutional Court [texto íntegro al final de esta crónica] They have overthrown the claims of the producers and distributors. That is, giants such as Warner Bros Entertainment INC, Universal City Studios LLC, Paramount Pictures Corporation, New Line Productions INC, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises INC, and Columbia Pictures Industries INC and their representatives in Spain, in addition to the entity of EGEDA audiovisual rights. These multinationals and powerful entities have lost to four individuals whose lives changed more than a decade and a half ago.

“Those acquitted will have to bear the financial burden of their legal representation in court”

Let us remember that the accusations requested no less than two years in prison and a compensation sum of 546 million euros simply because Series Yonkis hosted links to downloads of movies and television series. They did not host content, but instead pointed to sites where you could obtain it without a license. And they benefited from the advertising of one of the most well-known and used link sites in Spain.

What happens is that, as all judicial instances have been underlining until reaching the Spanish guarantee court, Their activity was not a crime until the reform of the Penal Code of 2015. That is, linking was not punished as a crime.

The tenacity of lawyers

It was precisely the enormous work of lawyers who were experts in technology and widely recognized as Carlos Sánchez Almeida, David Maeztu, Javier Prenafeta and Christopher Martellwith which they were winning one by one the legal proceedings against those responsible for the link sites.

At the time, the matter was of such magnitude that it led to an unusual State maneuver due to its transparent intentions: The law was changed in 2015 to make what was previously nothing more than an informative activity a crime.. Pure history of the Internet in Spain.

Is the law not applied as we would like? Well, let’s change it. Thus, in a pirouette impossible to describe and with the relentless pressure from the US embassy in Madridthe Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law was baroqued to an infinite degree in order to be able to suspend by administrative means (The Sinde Law) the activity of download link sites, while at the same time Articles 270 and following of the Penal Code were retouched to include these practices as a crime, although they are nothing more than intermediation. Such is the power of the content industry.

Judicial costs: the ‘other’ sentence

However, even though they are historical rulings, the TC does not decide the costs of all these endless processes: Those acquitted will have to bear the financial burden of their legal representation in court.

As usual, the Constitutional Court rejects in any case the request for costs to the entities requesting protection because “the mere admission for processing of this appeal for protection, because the Court considers that the matter has special constitutional significance, prevents appreciating the recklessness or bad faith that would legitimize the imposition of costs on the plaintiff” in accordance with art. 95.2 of the LOTC.

Even if they have won in court, the costs can reach 20,000 euros

What does it mean for those acquitted? Well then They have to pay their part of this endless process. There lies injustice that they are going to have to suffer, since travel, fees and other expenses vary for each of them around 20,000 eurosaccording to the amounts that have been confirmed by the defenses to Public.

All of this without taking into account the pressure that a cause so long over time entails. For one of the accused – represented by Almeida – this judicial pantomime has kept him under the threat of having to pay for more than a decade and a half. a euro or so every second of your lifeas his lawyer alleged in his appeal for protection.

“We do not intend for the sentence to be applied to the payment of our costs as a sanction but as a fair compensation for the expenses incurred by the process“, states Almeida in his appeal for protection. Likewise, this lawyer considers that his client should be able to access “compensation for the amounts that he had to invest due to his acquittal and subsequent confirmations of the same, amounts that he had to assume to repeatedly exercise their right to judicial protection”.

What the TC says

In both sentences, similar in content, the Constitutional Court dismantles the argument of an alleged defenselessness in the procedure, given that the accusations had already expressly admitted the proven facts in their respective appeals, and the proven facts show that during the first decade of this century the behavior of linking to audiovisual content external to the web was considered atypical. I mean, that there was no crime.

In second place, They also do not see defenselessness from the accusations when the possibility of a second instance was denied against those acquitted for a purely legal matter, and the TC accepts that, in any case, the activities of linking to ‘pirated’ content were not a crime until the penal reform of 2015, as is widely motivated both in the sentence of the Criminal Court 4 of Murcia as well as in the Second Section of the Provincial Court of Murcia on this matter.