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Deutsch: Portugal: Klagen gegen Urheberrechtsverletzer sind zwecklos

In a six-year long case brought by the Portuguese Phonographic Association (Associação Fonográfica Portuguesa -AFP), the Lisbon Criminal Court has recently given a ruling condemning a young men to a 2 month suspended jail sentence and a 880 euro fine.

Initially, AFP was after the 17 years old man (in 2006) for allegedly having shared hundreds of songs online without permission. In the end, for “technical and procedural reasons”, meaning a lack of evidence, the claims were reduced to three pieces of music.

Although since 2006, AFP has filed more than 40 cases with the Attorney General’s Office, this is just the second case with a favourable result for the association.

A good thing is that, realizing the uselessness of this type of action, AFP has decided to give up on the strategy. The bad thing is that it has decided to start pushing for new legislation. AFP president Eduardo Simoes believes that the current legal framework cannot deal with online file-sharing and calls now for the introduction of new legislation, something similar to the 3-strikes French system.

The Portuguese movie industry has already attempted to stop piracy by shutting down about 300 sites allegedly offering copyrighted material without permission.

AFP, which has seen a drop of about 80% of its revenues during the last decade, has however reached the conclusion that besides piracy and the economic crisis, a cause of this decline may also be an undeveloped digital offering and the artists’ growing tendency to self-publish.

Adolescent condemned to prison for illegal music sharing (only in Portuguese, 23.04.2012)
http://sol.sapo.pt/inicio/Sociedade/Interior.aspx?content_id=47570

Youth fined for three pirated pieces of music (only in Portuguese) (23.04.2012)
http://rr.sapo.pt/informacao_detalhe.aspx?fid=25&did=59435

Epic 6-Year File-Sharing Case Over Just 3 Songs Comes To An End (30.04.2012)
https://torrentfreak.com/epic-6-year-file-sharing-case-over-just-3-son...