Intelvision to appeal case |15 June 2021
- Sets record straight regarding Seychelles NATION’s erroneous article
Intelvision will appeal its case against MultiChoice Africa over copyrights claims. The judgment delivered by the Supreme Court of Seychelles on April 7, 2021, is simply an interlocutory judgment.
It is Intelvision’s position that there are several errors in the interlocutory judgment made by court. It will however wait until the whole judgment is given for it to proceed on appeal to the Court of Appeal. The decision to appeal will proceed, irrespective of the final decision of the court after the commissioner’s report. Intelvision is confident that it will win its appeal.
Meanwhile, the article in Seychelles NATION published on Monday June 14, 2021 is erroneous.
Seychelles NATION has stated that Multichoice Africa has reproached Intelvision for continuing to downlink and offer Multichoice contents to Intelvision’s subscribers even after termination of an agreement in July 2007 and that Multichoice Africa is requesting 24 million USD in damages. That is not factually correct. That particular case is not based on copyrights but rather breach of agreement and has been set for hearing in November 2021.
The case regarding the broadcast of the African Cup of Nations (Afcon) tournament is the one whereby a commissioner’s report is awaited because Multichoice has not made any specific claim in damages.
Seychelles NATION did not seek the views of Intelvision before publishing the article, and this in our opinion is bad journalism. Reporters should attempt at the very least to provide a balanced view in the same article or publication. In this case no attempts were made to contact Intelvision prior to publishing the said article. Intelvision is therefore asking that Seychelles NATION retracts all the factually incorrect statements published in its article of June 14, 2021 and issues an apology to Intelvision.
Intelvision lawyer
Editor’s Note:
The Seychelles NATION newspaper was happy to read Intelvision’s response to the article titled ‘Intelvision to pay MultiChoice Africa in content piracy case’ published in its issue of Monday June 14, 2021.
Intelvision’s lawyer wrote that the article is erroneous and if it is how the company sees it, Seychelles NATION presents its apology.
According to the press release, Seychelles NATION did not contact Intelvision for its views before publishing the article, and this in their opinion is bad journalism. Seychelles NATION would like to point out that there is nothing wrong in publishing one side to a story in a particular edition and the other in another edition. This has nothing to do with journalism.
According to Letrell Crittenden, PhD (December 10, 2020), today, ‘both-sides’ (giving the views of the two sides) has come to mean that news stories should give equal time to opposing viewpoints – typically linked to political causes – and that a failure to do so represents a form of bias.
He adds that today, the importance of this idea of balance has become so inflated. “It is used by people to outright dismiss news and information that appear to favour one particular ‘side’ over the other, even if the information within is factually on point.”
In fact Seychelles NATION contacted Intelvision yesterday morning for its comments and the lawyer did speak to our journalist and at 2.08pm we received the letter that we have printed.