In the early years of the 2000s, there were many projects that saw the light of day to share all kinds of content violating copyright, starting with programs followed by music in MP3 format (Napster being the best-known reference) and continuing with the video format. Spain has been the origin of many Internet projects, especially related to audiovisual content. Protected by copyright.
In SoftZone we have previously talked about some of these projects as SeriesLy, SeriesPepito and Direct red among others, all projects born in Spain that shared popularity with other projects such as Taringa and bye (also known as Megadede). Today it has been the turn of another mythical website from the first decade of the 2000s: SeriesYonkis.
Birth of SeriesYonkis
SeriesYonkis.com was launched for the first time in 2007 by a computer science student at the University of Murcia, a website whose purpose was the same as other similar websites: to publish links to series and movies hosted on Internet servers such as Megaupload, Rapidshare and so on.
As happened with similar projects that were born at that time, in which there was no legislation that defined the fact of sharing links as a crime, SeriesYonkis grew like foam, giving rise to other domains such as MoviesJonkis in order to obtain a greater number of revenues by forcing users to visit two different domains to access the same content that was previously only hosted on SeriesYonkis.
the problems begin
It was a matter of time before the Spanish government followed the same path as other countries to try to put an end to download pages. Spain’s first attempt was the Sinde-Wert Law, a law that the then socialist government headed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero began to draft, but it was not fully approved until the entry of Mariano Rajoy (PP) into the government, Hence, it bears the name of the two culture ministers of the different parties that managed it: Ángeles González-Sinde and José Ignacio Wert.
The objective of this law is to create a sustained economy focused on economic, social and environmental development to turn Spain into a country of innovation and knowledge. This new Law included a section focused on end internet downloads content protected by copyright.
Although its approval was delayed for several years due to discrepancies between the different political parties, this law had been in the making for years, specifically since 2009. As this new Law, initially called the Sinde Law, was being developed in 2010, the founder of SeriesYonkis decided sell the domains and all the content related to the activity to another company, a company that was in charge of its management in 2014, a year before the approval of the Intellectual Property Law, a law that declared criminal activity to offer download links, even if they did not host the content itself on their servers. That same year, SeriesYonkis and PeliculasYonkis were sold to another company, a company that completed the activity who had had those domains since their birth in 2007.
As happened with the founder of SeriesPepito, both the original founder of SeriesYonkis and the owners of the company who bought the website in 2010 were sued. But, since before the Intellectual Property Law came into force, the activity of sharing links to content protected by copyright was not criminalized in the penal code, all the defendants they were acquittedalthough the process was pending until 2019.
Alternatives to SeriesYonkis
Shortly before the Intellectual Property Law came into force in 2015, all the websites that shared links to view or download content protected by copyright stopped doing so. At that time, it seemed that this new law was designed so that Netflix could land in Spain, a fact that happened at the end of 2015, a few months after this law came into force. The only alternative that today continues to work like SeriesYonkis is Cuevana. Nor can we forget about torrent downloads or via Emule.