The Antitrust investigates Meta: “Report Siae’s music on Instagram and Facebook”
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The Antitrust gives, the Antitrust takes away. Five years ago, the Competition Guarantor charged Siae with the abuse of its dominant position in the collection of copyrights, confirmed last February by the Council of State. Yesterday, with a singular twist of fate, he hypothesized that the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers could be the victim of abuse of economic dependence on the part of Meta.
Copyright, the judges agree with Soundreef: “SIAE does not have a monopoly”
by FILIPPO SANTELLI
Three weeks of battles
“We are grateful to the AGCM for this decision which will allow us to return to the negotiating table to confront the American giant on equal terms, finally acquiring the necessary information to be able to ensure fair remuneration in the interest of the authors represented by Siae and, more generally, of the Italian creative industry”, says the president Salvatore Nastasi. The table, already scheduled, will be held today 6 April at the Ministry of Culture convened by the undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni; a representative of Meta who has arrived specially from Menlo Park also participates. “We are ready to collaborate to respond to the requests of the Competition and Market Guarantor Authority. Protecting the copyrights of composers and artists is an absolute priority for us, which is why we remain committed to reaching an agreement with Siae that satisfies all the get going,” says a company spokesman.
The previous agreement, in force since 2020, allowed the use of songs protected by Siae on Facebook and Instagram in exchange for a never disclosed amount. Expired on December 15, 2022, it had been frozen during the negotiations. After three months of negotiations, on March 16 Meta interrupts the discussion on the renewal and decides to remove Siae’s music from the two social networks.
Copyright
Skip the agreement with Siae: music off Facebook and Instagram
by Bruno Ruffilli
An initial meeting, in front of the joint Culture and Transport commissions of the Chamber, ended without results but with many exchanges of accusations between the parties. Now, however, something could change. Siae has the support of its more than one hundred thousand members, the support of politics, which sees the tug-of-war with Meta as an opportunity to reiterate the defense of Made in Italy, and also the solidarity of Agcom, which arrived on Monday. “We have not received any solicitation or formal investiture either from Siae or from Meta”, declared Giacomo Lasorella, president of the Communications Guarantee Authority, explaining however that “Agcom reserves the right to activate any formal notice and failure to comply with the warning order”.
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economic dependence
The Competition Guarantor insists on a fundamental concept, that of the difference in weight and relevance between the two companies, whereby one is in a state of “economic dependence” on the other. Meta’s turnover is reported on the 13 pages of the provision ( 116 billion dollars in 2022), but not that of Siae (almost 600 million euros in 2021, almost 800 million expected in 2023) and cited Law No. 118/2022, for which “economic dependence is presumed in the event where a company uses the intermediation services provided by a digital platform that has a decisive role in reaching end users or suppliers, also in terms of network effects or data availability”.
On the data the clash is even tougher: for Siae they would be fundamental to determine the amount of royalties due, but Meta does not provide them. How much is music worth for Facebook and Instagram? Difficult to establish, because it very rarely plays a primary role in content, and because it is not monetized if it serves as a background for videos under 30 seconds, which have no advertising. You don’t go to social media to listen to a song, but social media can make a song successful, so it’s the artists, the content creators, even more than Siae and Meta who lose out.
Thus the Agcm launched an investigation and established a precautionary procedure to reactivate the negotiations, imposing the “restoration of the availability of the musical contents protected by SIAE on Meta’s properties for the entire period necessary for the conclusion of the negotiations”. We will know in the coming days if music will really return to Facebook and Instagram; meanwhile on TikTok she never went away.
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