A Spanish judge last month dismissed charges against a website accused of hyperlinking to illegal material. The website www.ajoderse.com (which means 'fuck off') was accused based on the article 17 of the LSSICE (the Spanish version of the European E-Commerce Directive). The site includes hyperlinks to websites which, supposedly, describe techniques to descramble TV satellite signals, to get pay TV for free.

The judge gave 2 reasons to dismiss the case:

A) It was not properly stated in court that the linked pages where indeed illegal. B) It was not clearly shown that the owners of ajoderse.com were aware of the illegal nature of the linked webpages.

Without proof of these two prerequisites the judge would not apply article 17.

Nevertheless, article 17 could still turn out to be a powerful instrument for digital censorship. It is easy for the Spanish government to declare some site illegal, make it public in a newspaper, and then ask for the closure of every annoying web with hyperlinks to the now illegal site.

The sentence is important because it is the first application of the LSSICE, and it shows how this legislation differs from the European directive it is supposed to mimic, as the last one has no provisions about linking to illegal pages.

Text of the sentence (in Spanish) (07.03.2003)
http://www.bufetalmeida.com/sentencias/ajoderse.html

(Contribution by David Casacuberta, CPSR)