In a retrofuturistic world of murderous AIs and algorithms that shrink reality until it is plasticized and leaves it tasteless, Judge Pedraz, head of the Investigative Court number 5 of the National Court, grabs us by the lapels and muddies us again in the old debate whether the protection of intellectual property is above any other good or right worthy of protection.

I did not believe that in the time of synthetic content, of the channels of pedophiles, terrorists, weirdos and other insane people, Islamic or Catholic radicals, nationalists, deniers or flat earthers; In the days of the debate on how to prevent minors from accessing porn from the age of eight, what would close a communication service throughout the national territory such as Telegram would be an infringement of intellectual property.

Don’t misunderstand me: creators must be remunerated for their content, regardless of whether it would be good to open the debate on the concentration of the economic rights of the work of many in the hands of a few. But this also tastes stale. The closure of Telegram in Spain, based on an intellectual property claim, when it is unimaginable that it would be done for any other violation, shows that in our system, property damage continues to have more weight than personal or psychological damage.

If one understands that our law was born as a system of defense of private property, of organization of economic relations (including marriage) and to manage the transfer of individual violence in favor of the violence of the state, one begins to understand how it works. our justice. Human dignity and fundamental rights, although they sink their feet in clay in the French Revolution, are a modernity that we began to believe after the Second World War. But they continue to be the little sister of legal protection and in their universality they carry penance. If someone claims that the earth is flat or that vaccines have a chip that connects your prefrontal cortex to Bill Gates, no one will remove that content (or, obviously, block the entire service). Because freedom of speech allows even people who are at odds with the facts to express themselves and vote for other people who believe there are alternative truths with which to run the world.

If anyone thinks it’s bad for eight-year-olds to watch bukakes rather Dora the explorer, Someone will come and object to you technically or legally (freedom of expression, the legality of porn) or will say something about the doors and the field that exasperates me so much. The result will be that everything that is possible in the protection of intellectual property, from detection systems and automatic deletion of protected content to shutdowns of an entire communications system, is not possible when we seek to protect another interest that, in my opinion, It is more worthy of it.

Furthermore, no one has answered the question of who is going to pay Telegram, which has just raised $330 million in investment, for the reputational and operational damages of itself and its clients caused by a manifestly disproportionate order that seeks to close a channel knocking down the entire service. Nor has anyone explained to us how a Spanish judge is going to succeed in an endeavor in which Putin himself failed. On April 13, 2018, the Tagansky District Court (Moscow) ordered, based on the Yarovaya Law (which required the storage of communications and their encryption keys), to restrict access to Telegram on Russian territory. The block caused interruptions in the operation of many third-party services, but practically did not affect the availability of Telegram in Russia, which was officially unblocked on June 19, 2020.

The operation involved denying access to more than 19 million IP addresses associated with the service, many of them from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform that uses Telegram as a front-end. It does not seem that the task facing the National Court now is going to be easier nor that the failed result is going to be different. Along the way we will be left reflecting on what, as a society, we really want to protect and a flood of users infected with Trojans in their attempt to circumvent the ban by installing infected VPNs. Not bad for a Friday of Sorrows.

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