Pablo Soto: international file sharing pin-up
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- El Pais says it’s is the most widely-circulated daily newspaper in Spain and on Sunday it pointed out there are, ” nuances beyond the black and white view of illegal downloading,” said Times Online, going on:
“Under a headline ‘Pablo Soto, the hero of free downloads, prohibits the copying of their programs’, it noted that: ‘When any user tries to download a program created by this self-taught genius, such as Blubster, Piolet and Manolito, you get a notice that warns you that these programs are subject to copyright, according to international laws and in particular, of the United States and Spain’.”
The quotes comprise the last paragraph in a post on, “p2pnet friend and supporter Pablo Soto has for years been under attack by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, the Big 4 corporate music labels,” I said a week ago today, continuing based in Madrid, Spain, he developed the Manolito protocol, and P2P file sharing applications Blubster and Piolet.
A Madrid court is this month expected to rule in a case which, “although similar to others in Europe and the U.S., is being closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic because Spain is ranked as one of the world’s worst Internet piracy offenders,” said the Associated Press.
A week later, Times Online describes Pablo as an, “international pin-up in the file-sharing world. After leaving school at 16, he set up in his grandmother’s apartment in Madrid and in 2001 launched Blubster, one of the world’s most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing programs of recent years. Now 29, he is president of his own company and says he makes a modest living from advertising on his sites.
” ‘My programs are not just for illegal music downloads. P2P file-sharing has many more uses,’ he said.”
“Technology is always neutral, and you cannot accuse the developer of a program because of the use made of it by its users.”
If he’s guilty, so are the likes of Google or Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica which, “permit the process,” he argues.
The multi-billion-dollar Big 4 are determined to wipe this last survivor of the early P2P companies off the map, claiming Soto owes €13 million (about $C20,440,111) they would have made had Blubster not been around, posted p2pnet, quoting the Associated Press as saying Spanish courts have repeatedly ruled free music downloading isn’t illegal if it’s not for commercial use.
Scads of money in the right places
It’s no coincidence Big Music and Hollywood have in the last few months significantly ramped up their concerted international campaign to force compliant governments, such as those in the US, UK, France, South Korea, Australia and new Zealand, to show suitable obeisance by forcing local ISPs to act as corporate enforcers, informing against their own customers.
Pablo is to all intents and purposes the last of the original, and perfectly legal, entrepreneurs who wanted to make a living by giving people a means of openly sharing media of all kinds.
His persecution is an integral element in this carefully orchestrated, long-term effort, to gain control of the Net as the primary corporate 21st digital century marketing and distribution’ s vehicle.
The fact the cartels have no idea how it operates or how to deal on equal footing with the people who populate it is of no importance.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s RIAA and Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney believe brute force, easily manipulated print and electronic media outlets and scads of money in the right places are all that’s needed.
But they’re wrong. That used to be the way of things, but not any more …
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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June 16th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
He’s a pin-up all right — for the RIAA’s target practice.
It’s a wonder why they waited so long to go after Pablo, as most of the other major P2P developers were sued in the early 2000’s
June 16th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
What a lie, what a propaganda! Has Pablo Soto ever sued someone for copying his stuff like the RIAA and majors behind it did? When have these majors given their stuff away for free like Soto did with his software? How did the Associated Press manage to fail to notice that the latest work of Pablo Soto, namely Omemo, is free and open source under the GNU GPL (and the website content is under a Creative Commons License)? Is it that hard to get their facts straight? Besides, when they say “because Spain is ranked as one of the world’s worst Internet piracy offenders”, hell, whose ranking is this? I do consider Spain as a country with sane laws about copyright, they happen to take into consideration the well being of their society (probably because they’re not infected by lobbies as much as the US and France are). And I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one to think that way.
So, Associated Press or Propaganda Press?