Adrian Gomez Llorente, the 22-year-old administrator of infopsp.com, was sentenced to six months imprisonment and a fine of Euros 4,900 by a court in Logrono following a case brought against him by the Spanish Association of Publishers and Distributors Entertainment Software (ADESE) and the Spanish Videographic Union (UVE) who considered the site, which had a membership of 17,300 to be operating illegally.

Following a ruling by the Provincial Court of Madrid in September 2008 in the case of Sharemula, a site which offered eDonkey links to films, music, games and software, file-sharing sites such as infopsp.com, which provided links to pirated films, videos and games, were not considered illegal in Spain provided the owners did not gain financially, which was where Llorente came undone due to the fact that he was considered to be making a profit through advertising on the site such as Impresiones Web, Google Adsense, Canalmail and Correodirect. The site also earned revenue from a premium SMS service.

Spain was one of the world’s major offenders when it came to film piracy, with an estimated 350 million illegal downloads in 2008, an increase from 240 million the previous year according to the Motion Picture Association. The country was also on the International Intellectual Property Alliance Watch List. It was hoped that the sentence handed down by the court would serve as a precedent for subsequent cases and also act as a deterrent to others providing illegal content or making financial gain from file sharing.

The fine handed down by the court included compensation payments to the plaintiffs. It was considered unlikely that Llorente would serve the six month sentence as he had no previous criminal convictions.