‘Pasapalabra’ must be the most conflictive contest in the history of television in Spain. A few years ago, Telecinco had to stop broadcasting it after its appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court and now it is Antena 3 that is in a delicate situation, since The Court of Barcelona has condemned the Atresmedia chain to stop broadcasting El Roscothe star test of the program, and to pay compensation of 50,000 euros for moral damages.
The endless mess of ‘Pasapalabra’
The ruling comes as a result of an appeal filed by the Dutch company MC&F Broadcasting Production and Distribution CV against a previous judicial decision that allowed Antena 3 to broadcast El Rosco. Yes indeed, It is not a final sentence, so everything points to a new appeal before the Supreme Court.
According to the ruling, what had been previously decided affected only the program and not this specific test. By including it, Atresmedia has violated intellectual property rights of it for economically exploiting it without the permission of MC&F.
All this leads to Atresmedia does have permission from ITV to broadcast ‘Pasapalabra’, but not those of El Rosco, owned by MC&F. To conclude that, we have to go back to the 90s, awarding the authorship of that famous test to Reto Luigi Pianta and René Mauricio Loeb, who ceded the rights to MC&F.
Already in 1998, the Dutch company reached an agreement for El Rosco to be included in the contest ‘Passaparola’which was born from an ITV license on a previous British contest called ‘The Alphabet Game’.
Curiously, Telecinco did pay the rights to MC&F but not to ITV, which led to its being left without the famous contest. Now it could be Antena 3 that suffered an irreparable loss Well, the biggest attraction of ‘Pasapalabra’ is just El Rosco.
Indeed, the blow will be especially painfulsince Atresmedia will also have to upload the sentence in its entirety to its website and have it published there for a month, being forced to issue the conviction on the evening news of both Antena 3 and la Sexta.