competitionlaw

Recently, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an Article 102 TFEU investigation in the SIE case (decision no. 26312 of 21 December 2016, Case A503 Società Iniziative Editoriali/Servizi di rassegna stampa della Provincia di Trento- SIE ), which focuses on the interaction between intellectual property rights and competition. Società Iniziative Editoriali Spa (SIE) publishes the daily newspapers ‘L’Adige’. Euregio Srl GmbH (Euregio) provides a service of review of the news published on the local press to clients in the province of Trento (PAT). Typically, clients required Euregio to review the articles published, in particular, on ‘L’Adige’. Until the end of December 2016 ‘L’Adige’ was included in the Repertorio Promopress (RP) system. The RP system managed on behalf of the publishers, which joined it, the rights to reproduce articles published on dailies and periodicals. The RP system offered to undertakings providing news review services licences for the use the arti...

Introduction Article 23(2) of Regulation (EC) 1/2003 and the European Commission’s Setting Fines Guidelines [1] lay down the criteria for the determination of fines for the infringement of the EU Competition rules. Not astonishingly, one of the most often debated issues in competition litigation is whether the Commission has correctly applied those criteria, particularly in relation to cartel cases where the amounts of penalties may be hefty. In the judgment recently handed down in Pilkington [2] , a follow-on case of the Commission’s cartel decision in Car Glass [3] , the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) clarified which turnover of cartelists and which exchange rate to convert such turnover into euro should be used for the purpose of calculating the competition fines. The applicants, a numbers of firms belonging to the Pilkington group (thereinafter the Pilkington group), contended that the Commission, and later the General Court of the EU (GC) that upheld the Commission infring...