‘Overturn Sony BMG merger’
p2pnet news | Music:- A ruling which overturned regulatory approval for Sony and Bertelsmann AG’s 2004 deal to combine to create Sony BMG should be maintained, says the advocate general to the European Court of Justice.
“In a legal opinion that is not binding on the European Court of Justice but is followed in most cases, Advocate General Juliane Kolkott [sic] said the court should uphold a decision made last year by the Court of First Instance that stripped away EU clearance to a business that was already up and running,” says Associated Press.
Kokott (right) is also on record in another controversial statement.
EU law doesn’t compel telecom companies to hand over details of people said to have shared files with each other, she declared his summer.
On the Sony BMG deal, she said the CFI ruling had “rightly held” that regulators hadn’t done enough to show record prices couldn’t be coordinated.
“Kolkott [sic] did say the court was wrong to tell the EU’s executive arm to look at the market again – but this was not enough to throw out the entire judgment,” says AP, going on:
“Independent record labels took their legal challenge to the EU appeals court, the Court of First Instance, which agreed with them by criticizing regulators, saying they had not done enough to prove the combination would not lead to a joint monopoly in the record industry and players would not coordinate prices.”
The EU’s executive arm was, “forced to examine the deal a second time, using more recent information on the sector and clearing it in October, claiming mountains of new evidence to prove that the two companies would not damage the music scene by combining and shrinking the number of major music companies from five to four.
“It said it failed to find any evidence of collusion to back up complaints that record labels coordinated their budgets, prices for chart albums and others, overall pricing policies, release dates, access to retailers and airplay as well as how they calculated how well an album charted.”
Also See:
Associated Press – EU court adviser backs Sony rejection, December 13, 2007
controversial statement – Sweden may rethink ‘piracy’ law, August 23, 2007
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