The Barcelona Court forces Atresmedia to stop broadcasting 'El Rosco' from 'Pasapalabra'

The presenter Roberto Leal, in a promotional image of the program 'Pasapalabra'. Antena 3

The Court of Barcelona has condemned the Atresmedia group to stop broadcasting

de

.

The court also obliges the group, owner of Antena 3 —the television channel that broadcasts the program— to pay compensation of 50,000 euros to the plaintiffs for the damage caused and obliges it to publicize the resolution.

The sentence still admits an appeal before the Supreme Court and Atresmedia sources confirm that they plan to appeal in a process that they expect to take two or three years.

The chain ensures that the contest will continue to be broadcast with

included until there is a final resolution.

The court ruling comes after the Dutch company MC&F, which claimed for itself the property rights of

, filed a lawsuit against Atresmedia in which he accused the company of infringing his intellectual property rights on the final test of

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The judicial battle for 'El Rosco'

Atresmedia claimed that the ownership of the copyright to

had been resolved in a final judgment of the Madrid Court of September 2016, confirmed by the Supreme Court in September 2019. In other words, justice had twice ruled the reason to Antena 3 in the dispute it had with the Dutch company MC&F.

is the section of the

program that contains the moment of maximum emotion: a test in which the two finalists must guess, based on a definition, one word for each letter of the alphabet.

Now, however, the 15th section of the Barcelona Court understands that the issue of

's intellectual property rights had not been definitively resolved by the previous rulings.

The court concludes in its resolution that the creators of

were Reto Luigi Pianta and René Mauricio Loeb, who assigned their rights to MC&F.

The resolution considers that MC&F licensed the Italian company Einstein in 1998 to include

contest

, created on the basis of ITV's license to Einstein for a second game, known as

.

According to the sentence,

is, in itself, an original creation of its authors, Reto Luigi Pianta and René Mauricio Loeb, protected by the Intellectual Property Law, whose rights correspond to MC&F.

Consequently, the ruling affirms, the exploitation of said work by Atresmedia, with an ITV license, constitutes an infringement of these rights.

For this reason, the Provincial Court of Barcelona, ​​a section 15 court, condemns Atresmedia to cease broadcasting the program with

, to indemnify the plaintiff for the damages caused and to publicize this resolution.

The legal battles regarding

are almost as epic as those of its contestants.

In October 2019, a dispute was closed that had been dancing for nine years in court.

The Supreme forced Telecinco to cancel the contest after confirming that it admitted the demand of the British producer ITV for the rights to broadcast the program.

The ruling also established the payment of compensation by Mediaset España, but did not assess whether that specific test could be protected, autonomously, by intellectual property.

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