In 2015, the operators of ‘pirate’ download site Series.ly were arrested in Spain following copyright infringement complaints from rightsholders in the U.S. After a court acquitted the men of criminal wrongdoing in 2022, the rightsholders filed an appeal. The men have now been acquitted for a second time, eight years after being arrested.

In 2014, David Tardà, Andreu Caritg, and Oriol Solé were hard at work in Spain developing Tviso, a service with a goal to unify legal streaming services into a centrally-accessed discovery hub.

Tviso was a new venture for the Spaniards, although not an entirely unfamiliar one. At the same time, the men were also the operators of Series.ly, a then-four-year-old “social television” download site that aimed to blend the benefits of free access to premium TV series and movies with a walled-garden social network of entertainment media fans.

With a reported four million users, Series.ly was a success. It reportedly generated over 638,000 euros in the three years leading up to 2015, after which new legislation in Spain would render its activities illegal.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

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