Introduction The SGAE case recently resolved by the Spanish Competition Authority ended in a settlement agreement, as we previously reported . As we indicated in that article, this case did not just examine relations between the collecting society and users regarding the establishment of licensing terms and conditions. The initial analysis also tackled the complex…
Introduction 9 July 2015 saw the resolution of the umpteenth case involving Spain’s National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) versus a Spanish collecting society (judgment here). On this occasion, the society was SGAE, responsible for managing music copyright. The proceedings examined a complaint made by various composers regarding the measures that the society had…
The progressive breakdown of the legal system regulating compensatory remuneration for private copying has given rise to some unusual cases. We consider this to be true of a Spanish Supreme Court judgment of 6 March 2015 which had to rule on whether mobile telephones and memory cards were subject to compensatory remuneration payment, the amount…
A recent judgment by the Spanish Supreme Court draws a line under the legal dispute between the heirs of the British writer G. K. Chesterton and a Spanish publishing house concerning the term of protection applicable to the former’s works in Spain. The judgment declares that Chesterton’s works, just like those of any national or…
On 5 March 2015, the Spanish National High Court convicted the administrators of the website Youkioske of an aggravated intellectual property offence and of promoting and establishing a criminal organisation. The judgment can be deemed ‘historic’ since it is the first time that the operators of a downloads site have faced a penalty of this…
The latest large-scale reform of the Spanish Copyright Act was published on 5 November 2014. The key aspects of the reform are discussed here. The bulk of the opposition to the reform contends that two provisions of the Act, namely, the new regulation for private copying and the imposition of a “one-stop shop” system, breach the…
In a recent decision, the Spanish Market and Competition Commission (CNMC), imposed a fine of 3.1 million Euros on the Spanish collecting society, SGAE, for demanding an excessive fee for concert licensing. This decision is of particular interest because the Spanish competition authority has taken a new approach when interpreting the European law on the method of analysing the fairness…
On December 16, search engine giant Google started excluding stories from Spanish news media on its Google News service. The Californian internet company has taken the decision in the wake of the so-called ‘Google tax’, which forms part of the Spanish government’s new Copyright Act, due to go into force on January 1, 2015. The…
Competition and collecting societies: a special application of European legal doctrine in Spain. “It seems to utilise the previous methods in a forced manner, even though those methods had led to very different conclusions on a European level.” In a recent decision by the Spanish Market and Competition Commission (CNMC), once again penalising SGAE with…
“With respect to the current stunted reform, the new legislation once again touches on past issues that were never properly resolved, and I am afraid that this is still the case now. The first is the zombie issue of private copying and the second salient point of the reform is piracy. Other reforms regard the…
