Is it a cultural thing? Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy. Certainly well into the 90s you could still buy pirated media, especially video games, from every mom and pop store.
Having seen how Sweden changed their copyright law in response to the Pirate Bay website [2], I wish everyone knew that it wasn't always this way, and that states maintain their own rules. The idea that "no one shall copy any corporation's media, ever" is a recent propaganda success.
[0] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/14472/technology-protection...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing
Compiled software is not copyrightable in any country that I know of. Compilation is not an original creative process. The original software is copyrightable, and compiling it creates a (protected) derived work of it.
> I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.
The Pirate Bay is censored in Spain as much as it is on France.
LOL, what did you smoke, man?
Even my elementary school had DOS PC's with 5,25 floppies with Spanish and Basque translated games, even Logo... that in mid 90's.
On Copyright... I'm pretty sure Spain was bound to the Berna convention.
And, on piracy, in the 80's (in Spanish, your browser can translate it): https://www.retrogameshistory.com/2021/03/la-pirateria-espan...
https://base.speccy.org/ProyectoBASE_Historia.html
The parent comment confuses Spain and Italy as if they were the same... as if Spain didn't had French and UK influences from the North at all since the 1600's and before... yeah sure.
Spain had and has picaresca as the Italians, of course... but we aren't 100% the same and it shows off. We used to buy legal games in the 80's because the prices plumetted down because of the piracy, and between the shaddy game loaders and having to wait 15 minutes per load, everyone wanted at least to buy one or two original games in order to play something without losing literal hours trying to tweak the casette player.
Italy in the meanwhile just resold foreing games as if they were local. Some Spaniards did the same too; but it had small powerhouses as Aventuras AD, Erbe Software and such, not just a few by any means.
Example, July 1986 [0]: "Nine Madrid university students involved in a thriving pirated video game business"
--
0: https://www.abc.es/archivo/periodicos/abc-sevilla-19860718-40.html