‘Hello’ threatens to sue the users who shared the hacking of Tamara Falcó’s wedding on WhatsApp

2023-07-11 20:10:54

There is no doubt that the wedding of Tamara Falcó and Íñigo Onieva, held last weekend, has been one of the great events of the year for the gossip press. Magazine ‘Hola‘ He was clear about it from the beginning, which is why he closed a succulent agreement with the couple to guarantee the exclusiveness of the link. What the publication did not expect is that, this Monday, just a few hours after placing the number in which an extensive report of the wedding is included in the newsstands, it was going to be hacked and shared persistently through WhatsApp messaging platform.

In conversation with ABC, Rafael Juristo, lawyer for ‘Hola’, points out that the magazine leaves the door open for take legal action against the messaging application owned by Meta and against the private users who have shared the hacked report. At least, in case WhatsApp does not get serious and take action on the matter. «In principle we will follow the complaint channels of the platforms. We’ll see how they react. From there, we will study taking other types of actions if we understand that they may be legally viable against those responsible for the tools. Regarding users, if we locate those who give rise to illegal distribution, we will go against natural persons, “says the lawyer.

“Scourge of Spain”

Juristo explains that piracy is “a scourge of Spain”, where many users understand that any content published by a media outlet “must be free”. Although, for the moment, ‘Hello’ is unaware of the number of times that Tamara Falcó’s report has been illegally shared by internet platforms, and the effects that this may have had on the potential sales of her number, which is already going by the second edition, everything indicates that has no precedents in the Spanish press. “Copies of the magazine have even reached me from various sides,” laments the publication’s lawyer.

Be that as it may, cases like this are not uncommon. And, of course, ‘Hello’ is not the only publisher affected by the proliferation of copyrighted content on the Internet. “All the indicators show that editorial piracy in general, that of written culture, continues to increase compared to other types of works,” explains Carmen Cuartero, communication director of the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (CEDRO) in conversation with this newspaper. This organization has managed, during the first half of the year, to remove 123,243 links to newspapers and 90,196 to magazines from social networks. All for violating copyright.

With everything, Cuartero complains about how difficult it is to delete pirated WhatsApp posts, the platform “where more content of this type is consumed in our country.” «We have solutions that allow us to detect publications that violate copyright. The problem we have with WhatsApp is that, when we notify the application of its discovery, the groups in which this content is constantly shared are not closed, only the reported publication is deleted,” says Cuartero. Throughout 2023, CEDRO has only managed to get WhatsApp to delete 665 posts. Groups and contacts that have broken the rules have been able to continue operating.

civil liability

In a statement, the Association of Information Media (AMI) regretted the massive hacking of the ‘Hello’ report and drew attention to the fact that sharing this type of content can constitute “a crime against intellectual property and carries penalties jail for between six months and four years. The problem is that, as Borja Adsuara, a lawyer specializing in technology, points out, this only applies when there is a profit motive. Something that, in most cases of the people who have shared the report, surely is not fulfilled. Although This does not imply that, if necessary, they do not have to answer for the forwarding of the document.

«There is a civil liability that can give rise to damages. If in the end a single user is located who has distributed a file with a copy of the magazine, that gives me the possibility of claiming it and that I may have to pay compensation, “says Juristo.

ABC has contacted Meta to consult what happened with the hacking of the exclusive ‘Hello’. So far no response has been received.. Indeed, WhatsApp has tools for users to notify copyright infringements, although the application itself does not carry out any detection work. It should be remembered that communications through the application are end-to-end encrypted, so the company does not have access to the messages.