Morales & Besa represented The Associate Press at Supreme Court in Intellectual Property Case

Morales & Besa represented The Associated Press (AP) on the civil trial initiated by a former journalist, claiming a compensation for damages of approximately USD 3 million, due to a supposed breach of the Chilean Intellectual Property Law. He justified the claim stating that he worked for AP since 1980 and wrote more than 15,000 articles during that period. The claimant argued that he retained all the copyrights with respect to the articles that he wrote and that AP had no right to distribute them. The M&B team obtained the rejection of the claim in all the court instances.

The ruling of the Supreme Court, issued on March 9th, 2017, is unprecedented –this matter had never been litigated- and very significant because, if claimant had prevailed, it would have severely altered the labor and contractual relations between the news agencies and their professionals. In fact, accepting the claim would have implied that news agencies would not only have to pay their journalists a monthly salary, as they do know, but would also have to pay intellectual property rights for every article their journalists wrote.

The Morales & Besa team that participated in the operation was led by partner Gonzalo Cordero with associates Juan Ignacio Eymin and Orlando Palominos.