Software designer sued by Spanish record label association

The man behind a number of peer-to-peer file sharing programmes is being sued by a record label association in Spain.

A Spanish record label association is suing software designer Pablo Soto for enabling internet piracy with his file-sharing programmes.

The 29-year-old, who has designed three popular file-sharing sites, has been accused of profiting from the services, which allow internet users to download copyrighted material for free.

Mr Soto has admitted that he earns a living from advertising on his sites, but he denies committing any offence.

The Promusicae association, which includes labels such as Sony, Universal Music and Warner, is seeking €13 million (£11 million) in damages on the grounds of unfair competition.

"We are attacking companies who are profiting by developing applications that are used for piracy," said Antonio Guisasola, president of the organisation.

According to the Times, the €13 million has been calculated according to the number of times Mr Soto's applications have been downloaded.

The newspaper claims that his three programmes have together been downloaded more than 25 million times.

If this represents 25 million users, the damages claim arises by working out losses to record companies if each user was to download at least one track without paying for it.

Defending his programmes, Mr Soto insisted they have many uses outside of illegal music downloads, the Times reports.

News of the legal action comes after the founders of a file-sharing website based in Sweden were jailed by a court in the country over the intellectual property issue.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were behind the Pirate Bay, which pointed visitors in the direction of links to torrent files held on the computers of other users.