The ‘esports’ demand a specific legislation
The conference on legal aspects in electronic sports, held at UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, saw the participation of lawyers from some of the main lawyer's offices of the country, of the deans of the Faculty of Sport and Communication and of the vice-dean of the Bachelor’s Degree in Law.
UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia hosted a scientific conference on image rights in ‘esports’. It is a mass phenomenon whose market is not regulated, so it has to face various problems such as the topic of intellectual and industrial property and the employment relationship between players and clubs. This conference focused on the legal part and it saw the intervention of great names of the legal profession and of law at a national level, who work in the lawyer’s offices ‘Roca Junyent’, ‘J&A Garrigues’, ‘Ruiz-Huerta & Crespo’ and ‘Ruiz Pérez-Bermúdez’. They all dealt with the aforementioned issues in order to shed some light in this respect.
The event was opened by Pablo Blesa, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, and Jaime Sánchez-Vizcaíno, vice-dean of the Bachelor’s Degree in Law. On the other hand, Antonio Sánchez Pato, dean of the Faculty of Sport, was in charge of closing the event. The collaboration of these three faculties gives value to the transversality and importance of the electronic sports field in UCAM.
Marco Mourao, CEO of UCAM Penguins and member of the board of directors of the Esports Club Association (ACE), has an extensive experience in this field and, because of that, he knows the needs that it faces in the legal field and he explains them by using as an example the problem of the sale and release of professional players.
On the other hand, one of the lawyers who intervened in the conference, Marlén Estévez (Roca Junyent), noted that her lawyer's office proposed “the creation of a specific section in the Bar Association of Madrid to generate this debate and propose possible reforms and actions from the legal point of view”.
UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia has been at the fore in this field, by creating its own professional team UCAM Penguins, by making collaborations with different clubs, by actively participating in the training and research related to this field and by giving scholarships to professional players so that they can balance their studies with the competitions.