📰 New article from TorrentFreak
Spanish Film Archivist Faces Prison and €870,000 Fine Over ‘Non-Commercial’ Movie Site
If you’ve ever spent hours hunting for a rare, out-of-print cult classic only to find it nowhere on streaming, you might want to sympathize with “El Feo.” The Spanish film enthusiast and YouTuber is currently facing a legal nightmare that sounds more like a high-stakes thriller than a copyright dispute.
The man behind the popular YouTube channel La Filmoteca Maldita is facing a potential prison sentence and a staggering €870,000 fine. The culprit? Zoowoman, a non-commercial film repository he helped run. While the site didn’t actually host files—it just provided links to 11,000 hard-to-find titles—the Spanish rights management group EGEDA isn’t interested in technicalities.
The timing of the crackdown feels particularly spicy: the lawsuit arrived right as FlixOlé, a new streaming service backed by the same industry heavyweights, launched to capture the exact same audience.
El Feo argues the prosecution is wildly misrepresenting his finances, claiming they’ve conflated his modest YouTube earnings with the archive’s operation. With the police allegedly scrubbing server logs and focusing all blame on him personally, the digital preservation community is holding its breath. A verdict is expected soon, and it could set a massive precedent for film archivists everywhere.