Atresmedia has been exploiting the series for years without being accountable
The ‘There is no one who lives here‘ and the series that continued his legacy, ‘The one that is coming‘, is something that will be studied in the history books of Spanish television. And not only because of its virtues as a comedy of manners or out-of-the-box satire, nor only because of its audience, but because of the queue that its broadcasts continue to bring decades after their premiere. In the case of ‘No one lives here’, twenty years later. ‘No one lives here’ returns, but to the courts. Alberto and Laura Caballero, together with the screenwriter Iñaki Ariztimuño, original creators of the masthead, have managed to get the Madrid justice system to force Atresmedia to reveal the real emission numbers of a series that continues to generate income on multiple digital platforms. The Commercial Court No. 18 has given the green light to the preliminary proceedings that require a complete breakdown: how much the fiction has made since 2003, to which third parties rights have been transferred and what remuneration the group has received for each exploitation window. The chain replica. Atresmedia has replied firmly: ‘No one lives here’ is a collective work whose rights belong entirely to the production company, not to the individual scriptwriters, not even to the creators of the series. For this reason, he requested to raise the bond (precautionary measure that ensures that the obligations of all parties will be met during a process) to more than 290,000 euros to stop what he considers a “disproportionate” request. However, the judge has considered that there is legitimate interest on the part of the plaintiffs in knowing these data. The crux of the matter: analog contracts. The agreements that the scriptwriters signed with the production company Miramón Mendi, which disappeared in 2009, contemplated broadcasting on general channels, but the universe of on-demand distribution did not exist. Today, ‘There is no one alive here’ generates audiences on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Movistar Plus+ and Atresplayer itself, among other digital windows of whose profitability the original creators have not been informed in detail. With the law in hand. The Caballeros and Ariztimuño put on the table the article 75 of Royal Decree-Law 24/2021rule that transposed European Directive 2019/790 to Spain on copyright in the digital market. This text, which came into force in November 2021establishes an annual transparency obligation: those who exploit audiovisual works must inform the authors about all modes of use and the income derived. Atresmedia must report emissions and income, although as the defendants claim, they may only have to do so from the effective date of the decree, not retroactively to 2003, as the plaintiffs intended. The European standard pursued an explicit objective: to rebalance the balance between the astronomical benefits of platforms and production companies in the face of the growing precariousness of those who write, direct or perform. Other cases. The Battle of the Knights It is not an isolated episode. For example, ‘Física o Química’, the teenage phenomenon on Antena 3, faced its scriptwriters in disputes over the distribution of profits when the series multiplied its value in that digital market from which the Caballeros request data. Before, ‘Blue Summer’ was involved in lawsuits related to the massive retransmission of a work that TVE exploited for decades without the rights of its creators being clear. In the cinema, Álex de la Iglesia and the scriptwriters of ‘The Day of the Beast’ battled for financial compensation after the commercial success of the film, establishing jurisprudence on authorship and income distribution. ‘La casa de papel’ is not Spanish. The sector has been warning about this structural imbalance for years. At the meeting Screenwriters in Series 2022organized by the ALMA union, several creators denounced that the production companies had become “service providers” for the platforms, losing property control of the works. Pablo Barrera pointed out a revealing fact: ‘La casa de papel’, the greatest Spanish cultural ambassador of the decade, legally belongs to the United States, not to Spain: “That heritage that is produced does not belong to us.” The past screenwriters’ strikes in Hollywood in 2023 They claimed, among other things, this type of residual income. New paragraph. This process marks an important starting point for changing the way screenwriters are financially compensated. On the table, the confrontation of two legitimate principles: legal contracts already signed against an economic reality that has been radically transformed. Nobody could foresee that a comedy from 2003 would continue to make money in 2025 through technologies that did not exist at that time. Currently, all production incorporates specific clauses in contracts regarding “known and unknown media”, but audiovisual production in 2003 was very different. In Xataka | Beyond ‘La casa de papel’: how Spain has managed to ensure that one of every four series played is its own
