For a long time, “piracy” in Europe was synonymous with SeriesYonkis. It was the largest download portal and one of the favorites of users who wanted to watch the latest episode of their favorite series for free. Since then, pirated IPTVs have become more popular in Europe than download pages, for good reason: the complaints received by SeriesYonki managers.
The legal proceedings against SeriesYonki began in 2019, when Egeda, the Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management Entity, requested three years in prison and compensation of several hundred million dollars for each person responsible for the page. However, in 2021, the Provincial Court of Murcia acquitted the creators of SeriesYonkis, finding that they were limited to creating links to other web pages and that there was no evidence that they were aware of ” the illicit origin” of the content.
A court decision that was already controversial at the time, since SeriesYonki was famous among the Spanish precisely for accessing pirated content; However, the main thing was that the page itself did not host this contentand had no control over content hosted on other services. Even though users used SeriesYonki to find series and movies, to watch them they had to access another page, which in any case was the one that contained the possible crime against intellectual property.
However, the story did not end there and Egeda and some of the companies involved, such as Warner Bros., filed an appeal to the Constitutional Court; The public prosecutor also appeared in the case, demanding 167 million. But far from overturning the decision of the Murcia court, the Constitutional Court decided to confirm the initial decision, thus definitively closing the legal process.
The Second Chamber of the Constitutional Court rejected the appeals for the same reason that the Murcia court refused to convict those responsible for SeriesYonki: the law cannot be applied retroactively. Although it is true that today, and after the reform of the Intellectual Property Law, creating links to sites hosting pirated content is a crime, the initial complaint concerned the activity of SeriesYonkis before the new legal text comes into force.
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In fact, the current intellectual property law was created precisely to combat sites like SeriesYonki, which is why the Constitutional Court considers that their activities did not constitute crimes before the establishment of the new rules. The decision is therefore a half-victory for the pirates; on the one hand, they will not suffer the consequences of something that is not a crime, but on the other hand, It is impossible for a new Yonkis series to appear despite this legal victory for those responsible.
