File-Sharing For Personal Use Declared Legal In Portugal 179
New submitter M0j0_j0j0 writes "After receiving 2000 complaints regarding 'illegal file sharing' from ACAPOR regarding P2P networks, the Portuguese prosecutor refused to take the case into court on the premise that file sharing is not illegal in the territory if files are for personal and not commercial use. The court also stated that the complaints had, as sole evidence, the IP address of users, and that it is a wrong statement to assume an IP address is directly related to one individual. TorrentFreak has a piece in English with more details (original source in Portuguese)."
Re:Common sense and reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, possession of personal quantities of just about every drug [wikipedia.org] has been decriminalized in Portugal, for about 10 years now. The result has been a decrease in drug use and all associated problems.
Re:A little bit of sanity... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, even their drug policy is a bit more same than the rest of the world's, and it's paying off with less addiction.
More file sharing will bring increased sales.
Re:Drive it home (Score:4, Interesting)
Hold on, one second.
First, I'm assuming that "LESS crime" means less crime once you account for the fact that you're not prosecuting drug crimes. It would take a willfully ignorant misreading to screw that up.
However, how do you measure "LESS injustice" and "LESS corruption" as a result of decriminalizing drug laws? Not that I don't believe you, just that I think those would be hard to measure as effects.
Re:A little bit of sanity... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's easy to do because Portugal has little stake in copyright enforcement. Can anyone name a globally distributing film/music/software company from Portugal?
Re:U.S. law still applies (Score:4, Interesting)
Those laws all look like pretty standard extradition terms, actually. Many countries forbid extradition if it might carry the death penalty, for example, only do it for serious crimes, and only do it for crimes they recognize as crimes.
Which is not to say all countries always follow those laws (exceptions are made, for example, if they requesting country agrees not to pursue the death penalty in that case), but those are pretty standard extradition laws.
Re:U.S. law still applies (Score:4, Interesting)
First, they haven't gone after Assange in Sweden because he isn't in Sweden, and it would have made more sense to just do straight from the UK anyways since the US has a better treaty with them, and second, at least the latter two actually have extradition treaties with the US. Noriega was captured in a straight-up war (as a POW), and eventually extradited back to Panama (via France) to serve his sentence there. So, none of those were actually cases of "extraordinary rendition" at all.