outofprint

In October 2021, five riot police equipped with shields, tactical shotguns and a battering ram burst into the home of a YouTuber from Burgos known as “El Feo”. They were not looking for weapons, drugs or criminals who had committed blood crimes, but hard drives with movies. Films out of circulation, that no one offered almost anywhere on the Internet and whose exploitation rights remained in legal limbo until that moment. David against Goliath. With that assault, the judicial process begins, which culminated on April 9 with the trial in Burgos against El Feo, the nickname of the person responsible for the YouTube channel. The Cursed and the now closed Zoowoman website. The private prosecution, headed by EGEDA (the entity for managing the rights of audiovisual producers that Enrique Cerezo has chaired since 1998), requests two and a half years in prison and compensation that the parties estimate between 850,000 and 870,000 euros. No profit motive. Zoowoman was a platform without advertising, subscription or any type of business model. Its purpose was to rescue and make available to the public out-of-print audiovisual works, films whose production companies had disappeared or that had erratic or zero commercial distribution. Zoowoman functioned as a collective repository of links: the community’s own users shared access to films hosted on external servers such as MEGA or archive.org, without the files residing on the web. Sister website. La Filmoteca Maldita, the associated YouTube channel that is currently still active, functions as an archive of essays that provide historical context and cultural readings of genre and cult cinema. It includes nearly 4,000 film analyzes (according to data provided by El Feo’s defense), which is pertinent when approaching its intentions as a cultural disseminator, rather than as a mere exploiter. Several of these videos, as well as the often unfindable films that resided in Zoowoman, have been used as teaching material in universities such as UNAM, the University of Buenos Aires or the University of Medellín, as Feo himself states in a video where he explains his case. The legal argument. The prosecution cannot claim direct profit from El Feo because Zoowoman did not generate income, so it relies on the reform of the Penal Code of 2015which expanded the definition of piracy to include “indirect economic benefit.” Under this interpretation, offering free movies can be considered a “hook” to attract followers to the main channel and reinforce the reputation of the creator and generate income through other means, which would constitute criminally relevant profit even if there is no money involved. The police investigation estimated the alleged indirect profit obtained in this way at around 12,000 euros. The defendant defended himself by explaining that this amount is equivalent to his total income as streamer during its first four years of activity, and that the messages that the agents interpreted as codes from a piracy network were donations from its community (“for your birthday”, “so that you can have a drink”), consistent with the crowdfunding model of any independent creator. In January 2025, before the trial was to take place, the prosecution tried to reach an agreement: if he pleaded guilty and paid 100,000 euros, the sentence would be reduced to one year in prison. El Feo rejected him. Who sues? Enrique Cerezo, apart from presiding over the plaintiff entity, is the owner of Video Mercury Films, the distributor that controls between 70 and 80% of all Spanish cinema, with a catalog of more than 7,000 titles. He is also the president of Atlético de Madrid and the promoter of FlixOléthe platform streaming launched in 2020 with the intention of disseminating Spanish cinema from all eras, much of it out of print or not seen for decades. The complaint that ended the 2021 raid occurred shortly after the launch of FlixOlé, whose catalog largely coincided with that distributed by Zoowoman. The logic, described by the accused himself, is that Zoowoman offered for free what the new platform charged in a subscription. Cerezo has not made public statements about the case. EGEDA acts as a private prosecutor on behalf of the producers whose rights it manages, which includes films in the Video Mercury catalogue. This is not the first time that EGEDA has embarked on complaints of this type: in 2017 it denounced WebTV device distributors and in 2022, to 17 websites that they spread content without permissionamong which was Zoowoman. Beyond the trial. If the thesis of indirect profit prospers, any free cultural dissemination channel that builds an audience could potentially be prosecuted under the same legal umbrella. There are international precedents that point in the same direction. In the United States, the case of Hachette against Internet Archive, resolved in 2024 with a defeat of the digital archive, demonstrated that courts tend to prioritize the rights of the owner over arguments of cultural access, even when the model is non-profit. The legal question. Spain has a regime for orphan works (transposed from a European directive in 2014 and developed by Royal Decree in 2016) but its use is reserved exclusively for public cultural institutions such as museums, libraries or film libraries. An individual or an independent digital creator cannot rely on it, which leaves precisely the type of initiative that Zoowoman represents without legal coverage and which is called into question from the very moment Cerezo creates FlixOlé so that these films are no longer inaccessible. Image | House of America In Xataka | AI has been built by plundering the content of the Internet. Now there are people who want to charge for allowing it