The Constitutional Court has made final the acquittal of the founders of the SériesYonkis download portal, putting an end to a criminal battle promoted by large production companies for almost two decades. The Second Chamber of the Guarantee Court unanimously rejected the appeal filed by large companies like Warner or the Producers’ Rights Management Entity against the decision of the Murcia courts to acquit the former managers of the viewing platform series, a case in which they faced prison demands and million-dollar fines from the prosecutor’s office for crimes against intellectual property.
The SeriesYonkis site and its sister site VideosYonkis opened their doors more than 15 years ago and have become the main reference for download pages allowing you to watch series and films without going through traditional platforms or paying to watch them. The producers of the sector, as happened with other pages, then initiated criminal proceedings which resulted in acquittals: until 2015, the law did not sanction the fact of creating links, from a site like SeriesYonkis, to other sites or platforms allowing downloading.
The trial that took place in the Region of Murcia opened the way to other processes, such as that of Barcelona against those responsible for SeriesLy, and acquitted the former manager of the page. “There is no evidence that they were aware of the illicit origin of the information to which they referred or that it infringed any rights”, said these first sentences, nor that “no one was at aware of the illegality of the activities carried out by the page.
The legal proceedings included demands of up to three years in prison from the prosecution against those responsible for SeriesYonkis and demands for hundreds of millions of euros in compensation from the production companies which declared themselves affected by their activity. The public prosecutor’s office is demanding 167 million in compensation and the Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management Entity (EGEDA) amounts to 546 million.
The second chamber of the Constitutional Court, as elDiario.es learned from judicial sources, decided this Monday unanimously to reject the appeals that the accused had presented against the acquittal sentence. Conservatives and progressives understood, as the courts of the Region of Murcia have already said, that there was no violation of intellectual property rights.
