‘El Rosco’, again in the hands of justice for a lawsuit for his rights

The future of the veteran television contest ‘Pasapalabra’, that now broadcast Antenna 3 After the Supreme Court forced Telecinco to cancel it in 2019, it is once again in the hands of justice as a result of another dispute over the intellectual property rights of its star test ‘The Rosco’.

In the commercial court number 8 of Barcelona, ​​the trial for the lawsuit filed by the Dutch company was held this Tuesday MC&F Broadcasting Production and Distribution C.V frent to companies Atresmedia and ITV, in which it demands that the intellectual property of the ‘El Rosco’ format be recognized, its broadcast be prohibited and it be compensated for damages and prejudices.

In this way, the dispute that producers and television media have maintained for more than a decade over the broadcast in Spain of the successful program, which ends with its flagship test, ‘El Rosco’, in which the contestants must get it right, returns to court. a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet, based on their definitions.

A “very powerful” test, the producer who developed the Italian version of the contest has admitted to the judge, given that the objective of it (the program ‘Pasapalabra’ closes every day on the edge of the 21:00 newscast on Antena 3) it was to “drag the largest number of viewers possible” to the Canale 5 newscast. The program, modeled on the Italian space ‘Word of mouth’, it landed on Spanish television in 2000: Antena 3 broadcast it until 2006, but a year later it moved to Telecinco.

From one chain to the other

‘Pasapalabra’ 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 demand that the chain –Mediaset España Comunicación, SA– He had presented in 2010 against the British ITV company, as a result of a conflict with this production company.

The reason for that demand -has explained Mario Rodríguez, general secretary of Mediaset, that he has declared 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, claiming that this was not owner of the rights of the space. After its victory in court, ITV transferred the rights of the program to Atresmedia and Antena 3 returned to broadcast the program on May 13 of last year, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

The demand

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When the broadcasts of the contest began, two months ago the Dutch company MC&F had filed a lawsuit against Atresmedia in which it became the creator and owner of the intellectual property rights of ‘El Rosco’, asked to prohibit its broadcast and be compensated by the damages caused, in a figure that will be specified a posteriori, if you win the litigation.

A juicy television test that, the Secretary General of Mediaset has recognized, is the space of ‘Pasapalabra’ that attracts the most advertisers. Hence, the last question asked to the executive of this company by the lawyers of Atresmedia is if the purpose of Telecinco is to recover ‘El Rosco’: “We are interested in broadcasting any program that monopolizes the audience of the public,” he has settled.