Josep Maria Mainat and Toni Cruz, creators of the talent show Operación Triunfo, are suing Eufòria (Veranda TV) and the CCMA for plagiarism. They consider that “Euphória reproduces, with minute variations, all the essential elements, mechanics, phases and aspects of the original OT” and remember that they have exported the format to more than seventy chains. The litigation will be between format and genre. John de Mol also created The Voice, among other formats, both alone and with Joop van den Ende, the other founder of Endemol. The swift rivers of Gestmusic and Endemol converged in 1994, full of bread and big fish that occupied the shareholding. Companies can emancipate themselves from their founders (just remember the Llongueras case), but the authors retain intellectual property rights.
TV programs are artefacts of complex authorship. The judge will have to establish whether OT and EUOIA are dialects of the same language (the formed language) or if they only share gender (the talent family). TV genres as soon as they can become trans. For example, the reality show (Big Brother) has made the transition to cooking (MasterChef), adventure (Survivor) or falling in love (First Dates) to create transgender formats that are exported, more or less transformed, on many fabrics. To trans/form them means starting from the original format (and pay, that’s a cat), but it’s not as simple to demonstrate as with a song or a play.
In this case a single (EUAIO) quixotic (UIOEA) equation is given that allows us to predict the demand with euphoric (EUOIA) desymboltura (EIOUA) Belarusian (IEOUA): the plagiarism demand option is directly proportional to the audience of the program sueable, and Euphoria has a lot of audience. That’s why now a judge will have to decide if the euphorics have or don’t have otitis.
