Editorial Planeta Alvi

This small publishing house, created in Gerona -Spain- as Academia Svafor, gained momentum with low-cost direct sales of courses in digital format and, in 2014, moved to London under the corporate name of Editorial Planeta Alvi, Ltd., where it quickly established itself as a prestigious brand with the ability to combine tradition and future, incorporating the sale of works in print format. In 2017, it was sued by Grupo Planeta and, after a short litigation, it was forced to close unfairly. From its ashes, and after the recovery of a small part of its original catalog, the current Editorial Alvi Books trademark would be born.

The “Planeta Alvi” brand was legally registered in the United Kingdom, its books were published and printed in the United States, with an ISBN and barcode also obtained in North America, countries where Grupo Planeta did not operate or have its brand registered. The website was an online business that is hosted on the server of a company also located outside the European Union, specifically in Israel, a country in which Grupo Planeta did not have a presence either, although the domain was obtained through another company that if it was European, in this case German. Arguments, all of them, that would have left any Spanish judge without justification to judge facts that did not take place in Spanish territory, however, the thesis that although the activity was carried out outside the European Union and the books were manufactured in the United States, these could be purchased in Spanish territory through Amazon.

The judge, D. Salvador Calero García, did not want to admit evidence such as the commercial registry document in the United Kingdom, for example, and, however, he did accept several books, acquired by the plaintiff by Amazon, to assess, subjectively, a supposed lower quality on the part of the defendant publisher, without adhering to the data that appears on the last page of the same, where the interior barcode of any book appears and where it can be read with crystal clarity that those same books had been printed and manufactured in Charleston, SC, United States, that is, very far from Spanish territory.

Justice, which on this occasion was partisan, interested and unfair, added to a poor defense by the lawyer Carlos Baño León, condemned this editorial to its complete disappearance in 2018.

More information:

https://www.diario-abc.com/nota/15739/el-grupo-planeta-podria-estar-influyendo-sobre-det.html