Last summer, the television producer Josep María Mainat, one of the creators of the television musical phenomenon Operación Triunfo, publicly announced that he was considering suing those responsible for the successful TV3 musical talent, Eufòria, for copying them. That is to say, Mainat indicated plagiarism by the Catalan program.
Eight days after said statement, the creators of the TVE format have fulfilled their threat and, as El món advances to RAC 1 this Monday, they will take both the production company in charge of Eufòria and the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation (CCMA) to court. , the public communications entity dependent on the Ministry of the Presidency of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Eufòria “reproduces point by point the experience, the mechanics, the elements of the format, the scenery, the characters and the terminology of our show, without acknowledging its authorship”. This is how Josep María Mainat, creator of Operación Triunfo, along with his brother Joan Ramón Mainat and Toni Cruz, explained how the TV3 talent was actually a plagiarism of the famous musical format broadcast on TVE.
According to the aforementioned statement from Mainat last year, where he also spoke on behalf of his former partner Toni Cruz, they were considering filing a lawsuit against the TV3 talent producer, Veranda TV, for broadcasting the program “without the approval of its creators original, and also doing without the production company that has put OT on its feet all these years”.
Likewise, Mainat recalled that Operación Triunfo has been a successful program in “more than 70 countries” and that in all of them “they have always respected that the format is owned by a Catalan production company called Gestmusic”.
And it is that “ideas, if they are foreign, it is not worth copying them”, Mainat made it clear, accusing TV3 of having broadcast a program that has been sold “as Operación Triunfo Catalana”. Something that has deeply hurt the television producer, since in the Catalan region they have not only worked many times, but have also achieved important successes.
On the other hand, Mainat also pointed to the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia as responsible for this mess, “whose mission is to ensure the legality of the Catalan audiovisual media, and who are so fixated on heck, has manifested itself about this flagrant usurpation of our Property Intellectual”.
In fact, the producer considered the following scenario: “Sue TV3, which is the channel where we started making television? Denounce the CCMA or the CAC, which are agencies of the Generalitat? Or denounce the producer of the program that they have been blinded by the success and are already believing that they have invented all this?
Finally, as it progresses this Monday El món a RAC 1, the Catalan morning program presented by Jordi Basté, the creators of Operación Triunfo are suing the production company Eufòria, from TV3, but also the CCMA for plagiarism”.
A solution that will put the protagonists before a judge and that the latter will decide, first, whether to admit said claim for processing and, if it admits it, whether Eufòria will have to pay copyright after allegedly plagiarizing the true format.
