Series Yonkis

» see seriesyonkis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Series Yonkis ran from 2007 to 2014, which is precisely the stretch when I had broadband at home and was watching things I had not paid for, like most people with a connection. The distance here is language. This was a Spanish site for Spain, organized around Spanish subtitles and Spanish dubs, and Turkey was running its own version of the identical experiment in Turkish at the same time. Every country did this separately and none of the sites ever needed each other.

Alberto García Sola built it in 2007 and within about a year it was among the most visited sites in the country. The mechanism is the part that matters legally, so it is worth being precise: Series Yonkis stored no video whatsoever. It was a page of links pointing at files other people had uploaded to file hosts elsewhere, sorted by series and by episode, so that finding something took one click instead of forty minutes.

That distinction was the whole defense and it was not a technicality. Spanish copyright law in 2007 covered reproduction and distribution, and a hyperlink is neither of those things. A first complaint was filed on 2 june 2008. It then went essentially nowhere for years, because the conduct being described did not match anything the statute actually prohibited.

~ the record ~

~ the gray zone ~

García Sola sold the site in 2009 to Burn Media SL, run by Alexis Hoepfner, and it kept running alongside sister sites for films and for video. Spain spent those years being named in American trade complaints as one of the worst piracy markets in Europe, while a series of laws were drafted and then watered down on their way through parliament.

The pressure was constant and entirely public. EGEDA and the Spanish anti-piracy federation pushed the case with the Hollywood studios behind them, and what they were really after was never a conviction in that particular file. They wanted the statute rewritten so that the next site would not be able to stand up and make the same argument.

~ the day it died ~

On 1 march 2014 every link on Series Yonkis stopped working. The pages stayed up and the listings stayed where they were, and the links themselves quietly pointed at advertising instead of at files. No court had ordered any of it. Burn Media did it voluntarily, at a moment when the intellectual property reform then moving through the Spanish parliament was visibly going to cover linking for the first time.

The timing was the entire point. A law cannot reach backward, so a site that emptied itself before the reform took effect in 2015 would only ever be argued about under the old one. Everybody involved understood exactly what had just happened, including the people who had spent six years trying to get it switched off.

~ the trial ~

They were prosecuted anyway. In april 2019 four men went on trial over Series Yonkis and its sister sites, García Sola as the original owner and Hoepfner along with the operators who came after him. The studios asked for prison terms of up to four years each and put a damages claim of 550 million euros on the table.

All four were acquitted. The court held that the conduct had not been unlawful at the time it took place and that the 2015 reform could not be applied retroactively to reach it. The acquittals were appealed repeatedly and the Constitutional Court finally rejected the last of them in 2024, closing a file that had been open for sixteen years and had produced no convictions at all.

~ the legacy ~

In Spain the site is remembered as an ordinary feature of daily life rather than as a crime, which is what happens when a whole country uses something for seven years. A generation watched American television on it well before there was any legal way to do that at a usable speed, and the legal services that eventually arrived were shaped by demand the pirate sites had already proved was there.

There is also the part nobody put in a press release. Filmin, the Spanish legal streaming service, at one point ran a partnership with a leading piracy site to convert its traffic into subscribers. That is about the clearest admission available anywhere that these had been the same audience the entire time, and that the industry knew it while it was asking for prison sentences.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »