The ICT legal environment in Spain shows that the piracy rates are still higher than the world and european average, but they are decreasing. Regarding privacy, the government has issued laws to protect the information concerning internet users. Censorhip is present in Spain, but only to avoid terrorist advertisement and other major national conerns. Regarding domain registration, Es-nic is the company that regulates all requests.

Reports published by Business Software Alliance (BSA) and International Planning and Research Corporation (IPR)(24) in regards to software piracy, show that there is decreasing trend in software piracy, except for the year 2002. In the last eight years, the piracy rate has decreased by 30 percent to a piracy rate for the year 2001 of 40 percent. This number is still above the total worldwide average of 39 percent or the EU average of 35 percent for the year 2002. However, the 30 percent is an improvement that can not be discarded. The piracy has been found all around, from individual users to city halls. The same report showed that, although the piracy percentage had decreased, the losses it caused had increased due to an increase in price of the software.

The same report for the year 2002 shows that software piracy has increase to 47 percent. No explanation as what the cause for this increase may be. In my opinion, the increase in piracy in the year 2002 is due to the increase of Internet connectivity, and the diffusion of the P-2-P technology.

In regards to privacy, the Spanish Agency for Privacy Protection (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos), which is a section of the Spanish government, has provided guidelines regarding all aspects of privacy. It covers subjects such as, how to gather the personal information, what are the uses of the information the company has gathered or for how long can they keep the information. In addition, there is information pertaining to how the files containing this information should be stored, what kind of security is required and so on(25).

Another topic of the ICT legal environment is Internet censorship in Spain. After two years of public opposition, in October 12, 2002, a law was passed that enables the Spanish government to ban and monitor websites(26), the LSSI. A clear example of this is the action taken by the Spanish government to ban websites that are related to Batasuna. Herri Batasuna seems to be linked to ETA, which is a terrorist group in Spain. When LSSI was passed, Batasuna moved the page to Ireland. The Spanish government then did not allow ISPs to show Batasuna sites.

The last topic regarding the IP legal environment is how the domain names are requested. There are nine companies in charge of registering .com, .org or .net. To register a .es website you need to do it through Es-nic at http://www.nic.es/ (27). All of them have lawyers on payroll to ensure that disputes are kept to a minimum.