The Buzz | Website defying Spanish book ban taken down
A website that defied Spanish court orders banning a book investigating drug trafficking in Spain has been taken down.
The Madrid Booksellers’ Guild earlier launched an online tool that automatically pulls some 80,000 words from Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel “Don Quixote,” and pieces them together to recreate the contents of the banned work.
But the court struck back. The website was no longer available yesterday, less than two weeks after its launch. A one-sentence explanation on the home page at findingfarina.com/en/ said it was removed on court orders.
The website was the latest flare-up in a wider legal and political dispute over freedom of expression in Spain.
When Cervantes wrote “Don Quixote” in the 17th century, he couldn’t have imagined that the novel would be used as a weapon in a modern battle over freedom of speech in Spain.
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