Copyright Nonsense Is Back? Spain’s On Again, Off Again Telegram Block

In a bizarre turn of events over the past few weeks, Spain’s high court ordered a ban on Telegram because some users (gasp!) used the tool to share copyright-protected content. The judge then suspended his own order a few days later after receiving a lot of criticism. Then, the judge asked the police to investigate the potential impact of such a ban on users. Confused? Welcome to the twisted world of copyright nonsense.

Sometimes it’s odd to me how basically every internet speech story in the first decade of the 2000s was really a story about copyright. And then, post-SOPA, there were still some copyright stories, but things focused more on other legal issues, such as Section 230 or now the DSA. That’s not to say that copyright’s impact on speech has gone away, because of course it has not. But it’s felt strange how it seemed to at least fade a bit towards the background.

Last week, though, we had a story that felt very much like a story from a decade or so ago: Spain’s high court ordered a ban of the entire (extremely popular) Telegram messaging app after four large Spanish media companies whined about people sharing infringing materials via the app.

Judge Santiago Pedraz agreed to temporarily ban the platform after four of the country’s main media groups – Mediaset, Atresmedia, Movistar and Egeda – complained that the app was disseminating content generated by them and protected by copyright without authorisation from the creators.

Access to the platform – which is the fourth most-used messaging service in the country – will be suspended from Monday but it was already being suppressed on certain mobile phone providers on Saturday. 

Just a few days later, though, after there was widespread outrage and concern about banning an entire app and what that meant for free speech, the judge suspended his own order and asked the police to determine what the impact would be of the ban:

Pedraz has now halted the order and called for a police report to investigate the impact the temporary ban might have on users. 

The whole thing is bizarre on multiple levels. As I discussed on last week’s Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode, there was a period of time when Spain seemed like the one country in the world that was recognizing how copyright law should work in the internet era, making it clear that the liability should land on actual infringers, not the tools they used. However, the US entertainment industry completely lost its collective mind over such a possibility and directly gave the Spanish government new copyright laws. Then, they got the US government to declare Spain a pirate nation in the Special 301 report and threaten sanctions.

So, in response, Spain passed a long series of increasingly draconian copyright laws, even as economists noted the harm they would do. But, the Spanish government admitted that they felt they needed to pass the laws to avoid more pressure from the U.S. And the laws have only gotten worse since then.

Blocking an entire app from the entire country because a few users are abusing it to share infringing content should obviously be seen as overkill. But, again, Spanish copyright law these days is weighted so heavily in favor of industry, it doesn’t even feel all that surprising.

Still, it seems bizarre for the Judge to then ask the police to investigate the potential impact of banning an app used by 8 million Spaniards, or approximately 20% of the country’s population. Isn’t it supposed to be the judge’s job to figure that out?

Anyway, the case is still going on, so it’s possible that Telegram will get banned again down the road. But just the fact that anyone is seriously thinking about banning an entire app because some people misuse it to infringe… just kinda takes us back to ridiculous copyright takes from the early 2000s.