About

Virginia Servent Palmieri started her career as a litigating lawyer, and in 2001 she started an IP department at a full practice law firm named Asensio, Andrade & Asociados. She then went to serve as director of the intellectual property department of Guatemala at a regional Central American law firm named Arias & Muñoz from 2010 to 2013. As part of the law firm she was appointed to be a member of Amcham’s intellectual property committee where she continues as a member now on behalf Fox Networks Group, and was elected as the president of the committee for the period of 2016-2017. It was at this committee where she had the chance to meet a representative of Fox Networks Group in Guatemala, who was working closely with Arias & Muñoz Guatemala at the time. After that meeting they started working on a particular case together and a few months later, in 2014, she was invited to be a part Fox Networks Group Guatemala as an antipiracy director. Since her appointment, Servent has turn pirate cable operators into legal affiliates, significantly reduced under-reporting in Central America and Dominican Republic, and her biggest achievement was to approach and convert the main cable operator in Central America from pirate into an affiliate, who also committed to pay for the whole time they were retransmitting Fox signals illegally. She has been behind a number of pivotal initiatives and campaigns. In 2017, for instance, she was central to stopping the launch of Sportflix, helping the authorities in Mexico to stop a worldwide app that offers illegal content all over the world, by conducting a full investigation and helping find who was responsible for the infringement. Most notably, in 2018, the Group launched an awareness campaign in Guatemala addressed at children to raise awareness about the problem of piracy and how they can prevent it from growing. Servent had the following to say about this: ‘This awareness campaign was born as one of our strategies to work in order to stop piracy to be seen as a politically correct action as it has been in the past years. It started as an idea and we made a full program and presented [it] to our PR department who took this project as one of the main projects for the company, as part of our corporate social responsibility, giving birth to the Antipiracy League’. The project has proved to be a successful initiative, allowing children around Latin America to use a fully interactive website and Servent is commended for her role in achieving this. In fact, Servent visits schools and works with children by using audio-visuals, interactive games and drawings, allowing the children to act as creators. ‘The key of success for the antipiracy team where I have the privilege to be a part of, is that we all work with passion, and full commitment, this for us is not a job but a way of life, we enjoy every minute of a work day since we believe in the company and in what we are committed to do for the company’, she says.