The Supreme Court revives the 2.95 million fine on SGAE: losing dominance in one market is no shield against abuse in another
The High Court annuls the National Court ruling that freed SGAE from the CNMC fine and sets doctrine on related markets.
Spain's competition authority, the CNMC, and the collecting society SGAE will meet again before the National Court. The Supreme Court has annulled the judgment that freed the society from a 2.95 million euro fine for hindering its competitors in the management of intellectual property rights, and it has done so by setting doctrine that goes beyond the case: losing a dominant position in one of the affected markets is not enough to bring down the whole sanction, according to El Confidencial.
The origin: conditions that tied members down
The dispute began in 2017, when the CNMC opened an investigation after complaints by DAMA and Unison Rights, two operators competing with SGAE in rights management. The file ended in May 2019 with a 2.95 million euro fine for abuse of a dominant position.
The authority found that the society had imposed statutory and contractual conditions that unjustifiably restricted its members' freedom to decide whether to entrust all their rights to SGAE or to withdraw part of them for other operators. In practice, those limits made it hard for authors, composers and publishers to leave the society partially and contract with competitors.
The National Court annulled the fine in full in December 2023. Its argument was that SGAE had lost its dominant position in the audiovisual rights management market in 2018, the last year investigated, because of the growth of DAMA, which had gone from controlling between 10 and 20 per cent of the audiovisual repertoire to a share of between 40 and 70 per cent, depending on the estimate used.
The doctrine of related markets
The Supreme Court, in a judgment dated 21 October seen by El Confidencial, corrects that analysis as incomplete. The CNMC had identified three abuses in different markets, and the loss of dominance in one of them does not automatically dismiss the infringements in the others.
The key doctrine is that of related markets. A company can leverage its dominant position in one market to restrict competition in another closely related sector, even without proving dominance in the latter. It is enough that close links exist between the two markets for the real or potential effects of the dominant position to be capable of shifting from one to the other.
An almost decade-long file
The case illustrates the real timelines of competition enforcement in Spain: investigation opened in 2017, sanction in 2019, annulment by the National Court in December 2023 and correction by the Supreme Court in October 2026, with the file sent back for a fresh ruling. The society, chaired by Antonio Onetti, must still wait for a new decision of the National Court on the open substantive questions.
Remittal without acquittal
The judgment does not confirm the fine: it sends the case back to the National Court to resolve the questions left open, among them whether abusive conduct actually existed and whether it produced restrictive effects on competition. The connection between markets does not by itself imply infringement, the High Court warns.
Source: El Confidencial (31 October 2026).
Related links
Fuentes
- elconfidencial.com. Accessed 2 November 2026.
The specific data in this article come from the official sources cited.
