After the broadcast on Telecinco was cancelled, the future of the veteran television contest Pasapalabra, which is now broadcast by Antena 3, is in the hands of justice. After ruling in 2019 by the Supreme Court that the programming on Teleicnco was canceled due to non-payment to the production company ITV Studios, now the intellectual property rights of its star test, El Rosco, which was not integrated into the original version of the British format , are once again being questioned. . The trial for the lawsuit filed by the Dutch company MC&F Broadcasting Production and Distribution CV
was held this Tuesday in the Commercial Court number 8 of Barcelona.against the companies Atresmedia and ITV, in which it demands that the intellectual property of the El Rosco format be recognized, that its broadcast be prohibited and that it be compensated for damages and prejudice.
A “very powerful” test has been presented to the court by the producer who developed the Italian version of the contest and who included this test for the first time. It was an idea that was implemented to “draw as many viewers as possible” to the news program on Canale 5 and this has been the case in Spain on both Telecinco and Antena 3, Pasapalabra platform for the subsequent news.
The program, modeled after the Italian version Passaparola, landed on television in Spain in 2000: Antena 3 broadcast it until 2006, but a year later it moved to Telecinco.
Pass wordIt was already the subject of a first legal dispute that was settled in October 2019, when the Supreme Court forced Telecinco to stop broadcasting the program after losing the lawsuit that Mediaset had filed in 2010 against the British company ITV, as a result of a conflict with this producer.
The reason for this demand, explained in the trial Mario Rodriguez, general secretary of Mediaset, who has testified as a witness, is a letter that the company received from MC&F informing him that he held the license for El Rosco, for which he decided to sign a contract with that Dutch company and take ITV to court, alleging that it did not own the rights to the space.
After its victory in court, ITV transferred the rights to the program to Atremedia and Antena 3 re-broadcast the program on May 13 last year, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
When the broadcasts of the contest began, it had been two months since the Dutch company MC&F had filed a lawsuit against Atresmedia. MC&F urged the judge to provisionally suspend the broadcast of the final test “El Rosco” while he resolved on the merits of the issue, but his request was rejected.
The Supreme Court ruling that in 2019 settled the litigation for the rights of “Pasapalabra” did not determine whether the “El Rosco” test is capable of being protected by intellectual property as an autonomous format, an issue that has now become the main object of the lawsuit filed by MC&F.
