2023-05-07 11:12:52
Los catering establishments They are increasingly active on social media. Aware of the privileged showcase offered by Facebook or Instagram to promote your business, it is very common, for example in the case of those who organize banquets, that publish photos of the carefully decorated tables, of the appetizing appetizers and main courses, of the corners dedicated to sweets or, depending on the type of celebration, of the balloons or children’s motifs that shine in the halls. But it can happen that those images turn against you. This is what happened to a restaurant that was condemned by the Commercial Court 3 of Pontevedra, with headquarters in Vigoto pay 5,769 euros to the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) for Copyright for about thirty musical entertainment events carried out in its facilities for more than three years. One of the key pieces of evidence taken into account by the magistrate, which was contributed to the procedure by the claimant entity, were the publications made by the establishment on social networks of the white, baptisms o first communions that were held in that period.
This ruling on the matter of violation of intellectual property rights, against which it was possible to file an appeal, is one of those issued in recent months by the Vigo court in relation to this type of lawsuits that, after the COVID break, have skyrocketed again. In this specific case, the establishment and the SGAE had a contract in force since 2007, but the entity took the restaurant to court because from May 2016 to December 2019 the venue, he stated in his lawsuit, stopped communicating “the events carried out with music entertainment.” Once the procedure was judicialized, the restaurant partly agreed, specifically to the payment of 1,680 euros, by recognizing the celebration of ten weddings during the litigious period with the use of musical repertoire. But he denied the remaining events that were claimed, another 25, which were the ones that raised the debt to those more than 5,700 euros that were demanded.
Intellectual property
33 procedures between January and April
After the break in 2020 and 2021, these disputes grow again in Vigo. There were 67 in 2022 and 33 so far this year.
Cases that usually end in conviction
With few exceptions, the lawsuits promoted by the SGAE always end in a conviction.
The judge sees accredited the celebration with music of all banquets that claimed the SGAE. Not only because of what employees of the entity declared and because of the visit records presented, but also because of the evidence collected online. “As stated in the lawsuit and in the attached documentary, the events held by the defendant at their premises are being advertised on the internet on the web, on Facebook and on Instagram. There are references to it in forums and on the Internet related to this matter, without the generic challenge, without evidence to the contrary, serving to undermine the probative value of this evidence provided by the plaintiff”, the court decision states. The information “extracted from the internet”, summarizes the magistrate, corroborates the “credibility” of what was stated by the personnel of the plaintiff company. What was contributed to the procedure, also concludes, evidence “a dynamic of a certain continuity of celebration of parties” in the restaurant, which, censure, when required to display the accountinglas invoices and the fiscal model of operations with third parties carried out during the period that focused the lawsuit, “opted for the contribution of partial documentation and a biased statement of acts.”
televisions in a hotel
other sentences Issued in recent months by this court derived from more SGAE lawsuits are equally damning. In one of them, a downtown man is condemned hotel by televisions installed in its almost 60 rooms. The establishment claimed that these televisions only allow the reproduction of informative news programs, and not of works of intellectual property, and, in any case, that they are not acts of “public communication”. The judge does not share this criterion because, based on existing jurisprudence, even if guests do not connect audio or television devices when they are in the rooms, or even if they are absent from them for most of the day, this “does not exonerate ” to the hotel of the obligation to pay for the concept of copyright.
The entity resumes its judicial offensive after the COVID break: two lawsuits every week
In 2019, the only specialized commercial court in Vigo added almost 80 lawsuits formalized by the SGAE against bars, restaurants, pubs, hotels or party commissions for the reproduction of protected music without paying the fee. Over the next two years these lawsuits plummeted. After the outbreak of COVID, hardly any new lawsuits filed by this company or by other intellectual property rights companies were received: in 2020 only four procedures entered and in 2021 only three were received. But this truce has already come to an end. In 2022, 67 demands were registered and between January and April of this year, 33 were already recorded, that is, an average of two each week.
The offensive during the times of the coronavirus did not stop in any case completely, because, in the midst of a health crisis, the SGAE did continue to file lawsuits to try to collect via sentence execution the money from cases that he had already won and that had a firm judicial resolution, as well as urging acts of conciliation or preliminary proceedings in order to obtain information for future litigation. What they interrupted was the presentation of new lawsuits, but that is now history since the statistics show how the judicial activity of the authors’ society is once again very active. In the vast majority of cases, the court agrees. and condemns the establishments to pay the canon. But in recent years there have been three venues from Vigo that have won the pulse of the SGAE: a small cafeteria on Zamora street, a canido bar y another establishment of Camposancos.
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