According to Boing Boing, 115 leaked diplomatic cables from the latest Wikileaks document dump were related to the upcoming intellectual property law in Spain.
El Pais, a Spanish newspaper that has all of the 115 documents from the US Embassy in Madrid, has released 35 of them. The first batch of documents confirms what has been widely believed to be true: that the U.S. trade representative (working in conjunction with U.S. trade groups) wrote the country's upcoming copyright/Internet law.
Spain's new copyright law is being put to a vote this month. Boing Boing has some text in Spanish released from El Pais. Admittedly, trying to translate it via various online services (I’m looking at you Google), doesn't do the text justice.
Will Spanish lawmakers continue on the path set for them by U.S. influence or think for themselves now that these documents have been released. We will find out soon enough.
Comments
Re: Wikileaks Docs Reveals U.S. Influence on Spanish ...
I think this is a wonderful example of why these types of leaks to the population rather then reporters can be important.
Wikileaks does not have the only diplomatic cables that have been leaked over the last year... several stories that have been in the news also came from leaks completely unrelated to Manning's batch. However, in those other cases, the public got told what the reporter wanted to tell them, what fit in with the reporter's narrative, and what fit in with the reporter's publication's narrative. If the paper did not care about issues like this (as most will not), then that info never saw the light of day.... essentially, people with agendas were holding on to the raw data.
In this case however, the same raw data is available to everyone, so even small interest groups like people who care about copyright laws can find things relavent to them... things that someone is unlikely to risk their career to leak just that information....
I know this does not sound like a big deal, but in a way, it really is. The 4th estate needs to be kept in check just as much as the government does, and keeping things people want to know behind their wall of secrecy is not much better then the government's wall.... you still have narrow interest groups deciding what you need to know and what you do not need to know, and they will only tell you what is in their best interest.. not your's.