Judge Orders Blocking of Torrent Sites in Spain
In 2007, Spanish police took two torrent sites offline, Todotorrente and sister-site Trackertdt, and arrested their administrators for facilitating copyright infringement. — September 2008 saw the acquittal of the Todotorrente admin …
Context & Ripple Effects
Spain's copyright enforcement story has been running on two tracks. On the criminal track, police took Todotorrente and sister-site Trackertdt offline in 2007 and arrested their administrators — only for an admin to be acquitted in September 2008, undercutting prosecution as an enforcement tool. On the civil track, TorrentFreak reported just twelve days ago that Spanish courts had declared file-sharing and link sites legal, a ruling widely read as hostile to industry blocking demands.
Today's report of a judge ordering torrent sites blocked sits awkwardly across both tracks: it pursues at the ISP level what prosecutors failed to win in court, and what another Spanish ruling appeared to rule out days earlier. That internal contradiction — between the judiciary's own branches — is what makes this more than a local takedown.
First-order effects
- Spanish ISPs are now on the hook to implement blocking of the named torrent sites, shifting enforcement cost from rights holders' litigation budgets to network operators' infrastructure.
- Todotorrente's users face loss of direct access, though the September 2008 acquittal shows the underlying facilitation charge does not reliably stick against site operators themselves.
Second-order effects
- Rights holders gain a prosecutable template — judicial blocking orders — that sidesteps both the failed criminal prosecutions and the pro-linking rulings, inviting follow-on requests against other Spanish and foreign-hosted sites.
- ISPs and digital-rights groups are pushed into opposing judicial overreach, setting up appeals that force Spanish courts to reconcile the blocking order with the March 2010 ruling that link sites are lawful.
Third-order effects
- If blocking orders become the default remedy where prosecutions fail, Spain moves toward a UK-style administrative censorship regime decided judge-by-judge rather than by statute — a pattern the same era's TorrentSpy litigation in the US never reached.
- Divergent national outcomes for identical site types (legal here, blocked there) increase pressure for EU-level harmonization of how member states handle infringing-linking platforms.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is migrating from arresting site operators — a tactic undermined by acquittals like Todotorrente's — to judicially mandated ISP-level site blocking.