In an article published by the Swedish on-line edition of Computer Sweden, security expert Rik Ferguson from Trend Micro comments on the Mariposa bot-net and the fact that the guys running the bot-net are up for trial. Translated to English he is claimed to say the following in the article: “The men behind the bot-net were running it from Spain where it is not an illegal act”. He also calls for the need to harmonize legislation dealing with cybercrime and claims that the prosecutors have to prove that the perpetrators have stolen information as that is the (only) act that is criminalized in Spain.
Now, granted, I do not know what the Spanish regulations say about denial of service attacks carried out by bot-nets from Spain, but I would like to point to two pieces of legislation which are precisely the kind of harmonization attempts that he calls for and which (at least one of them at least) legally binds Spain to criminalize the crimes he describes.