As you may or may not know, a recent law has entered into operation this weekend in Spain.
The LSSI, or Law of Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce, is an over-reaching bill which mandates that ISPs retain logs on users activity for a year (which only government officials will be able to access) and that websites that operate (even partially) in Spain have information about their owners available on the site itself, and be registered in the official “Mercantile Register” (whose bureaucrats haven’t the slightest idea about the procedure for doing so, btw).
The law is so strict in its punishments, yet so abstract in its wording and so ambiguous in its possible interpretations that the government has been forced to provide clarifications regarding its application.
While this bill may prove useful against scam artists and spammers (too bad only a fraction of them is Spain-based though), it has produced a wave of FUD among the internet community. Nobody is sure if the law applies to its personal website or only to commercial or lucrative sites, and many sites are closing until the waters are more clear.
You may think that this is a Spain-only calamity, but this bill is but an instantiation of an EU-spanning directive, so you may as well mourn for us because sooner or later it will affect you too :(
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition?