On 19 December 2023, the Spanish Supreme Court handed down a judgment in which it upheld the judgment by the Navarra Court of Appeal, which had in turn ruled on the scope of an assignment of intellectual property rights to Kukuxumusu Ideas, SL by the creators of the “Kukuxumusu Universe” characters.
The creators had previously worked for the company (more specifically, one of them had been a founder and director of Kukuxumusu in 1994, until he subsequently founded the Katuki Saguyaki initiative, in which he was joined by several of the cartoonists who had worked with him during his time at Kukuxumusu).
In 2016, through the shop.katukisaguyaki.com website, Katuki Saguyaki marketed a collection of 43 products that included drawings based on the same characters as the drawings originally assigned to Kukuxumusu Ideas, SL (“San Fermín 2016 Collection”).
In the opinion of Kukuxumusu Ideas, SL, the new drawings infringed the rights that the Company had acquired, and it therefore brought a legal action.
The Court’s Judgment, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, found that the creators of the characters could make new drawings of these same characters so long as they were sufficiently different so as not to be deemed a copy of the specific drawings that had been assigned. In this regard, the Supreme Court found that “indeed, the margin that remains for the drawings’ creators to make new drawings of these characters from the Kukuxumusu Universe is limited, insofar as the new drawings must be different enough not to be considered a copy of the drawings that formed the subject of assignment and not to infringe the reproduction right”.
These Judgments would lead us to conclude that it is fundamentally important to sign agreements with the scope necessary to avoid being faced with situations such as this one, in which two companies could be marketing products that include the same characters, even though the drawings are sufficiently different so as not to be deemed a reproduction.