If confirmation was needed that the Sanremo Festival is serious stuff and not “just songs”, here it comes from the austere Regional Administrative Court.
Following the appeal of the president of the Italian record companies who would like to dismantle the current Festival structure and also remove it from the City of Flowers, it emerged that the Convention which regulates the economic, artistic and advertising relationships between Rai and the Municipality of Sanremo contains «confidential information relating to technical and commercial secrets».
For this reason, the Municipality and Rai refused to hand them over to the lawyers of Sergio Cerruti, president of Afi (Italian Phonographic Association) and managing director of the JE record label, which is the company that filed an appeal against the Municipality of Sanremo and Rai regarding the concession of the exclusive use of the “Italian Song Festival” trademark.
And again for this reason, therefore to protect secrets but also to guarantee that Cerruti’s appeal can benefit from all the necessary information, the judges have decided to exploit a possibility granted by law: they, and only they, will read the Convention to thus being able to understand whether the reasons for Cerruti’s appeal have a basis or not.
The law firm Lipani Catricalà & partners which looks after JE’s interests has as its aim «that of protecting the Italian music industry: despite being the owner of the Festival’s contents, Rai recognizes less than 0.5% of the revenues. A treatment that has revealed not only critical issues regarding the methods of awarding the Festival by the Municipality but also commercial disparities for the companies involved”. Among the acts challenged in the appeal is the resolution of 21 November 2023 “with which the Municipality of Sanremo has approved the draft agreement to be stipulated with RAI for the concession of the exclusive use of the “Italian Song Festival” brand for the holding of the 74th and 75th edition of the “Italian Song Festival” for the years 2024 and 2025″. The TAR specifies that “the text of the Agreement, filed on 10 January 2024 by the Municipality of Sanremo, is obscured in various parts, as, according to the Municipality and RAI, these are clauses of the agreement containing technical secrets or commercial” but also that “the administrative judge can confidentially acquire the aforementioned document in order to carry out an impartial scrutiny”. Thus, «the confidential acquisition of the full version of the agreements mentioned above (without blacked-out parts) is arranged, without deposit on the PAT (Telematic Administrative Process) platform, so that the Court can evaluate whether the blacked-out parts are ostensible or not. , in whole or in part.”
