Italian Copyright Collecting Society in the Annulment of EU Antitrust Decision

Cleary Gottlieb represented SIAE (the Italian copyright collecting society) in the successful appeal before the General Court of the European Union obtaining the partial annulment of the European Commission’s 2008 decision finding that EU copyright collecting societies carried out a concerted practice.

Following the appeals brought by most of the concerned collecting societies and the CISAC (The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, a non-profit non-governmental organization which represents, in over a hundred countries, collecting societies managing copyright) on April 12, 2013, the General Court upheld SIAE’s arguments that the Commission, on the one hand, did not have documents proving the existence of a concerted practice between the collecting societies as regards the territorial scope of the mandates which they grant each other and, on the other hand, did not render implausible the applicants’ explanations that the alleged parallel conduct of the collecting societies at issue was not the result of a concerted practice.