In a ruling filed on February 2, the Council of State (the Amministrative court of Appeal in Italy) put an end to a court case, filed in 2009 by the company “Edizioni Master” SpA, against the mandatory SIAE labelling of all recorded medias attached to magazines (SIAE is the Italian collecting society for copyrighted works).

The story started in 2001: the Presidency of the Council of Ministers adopted
Decree n.331/2001 to regulate the request for SIAE label on these media (first
introduced as mandatory by Law n. 248/2000), but forgot the prescribed prior
notification of said act to the European Commission. For this reason, in its
judgment of 8 November 2007, the European Union Court of Justice declared the Decree unenforceable, pursuant to the Parliament and Council Directive no. 98/34/EC.

Following this judgment, “Edizioni Master” requested the SIAE and the Presidency of the Council the refund of all contributions paid for the labels from 2004 to 2008, and began to sell new medias without the SIAE labels on.

In 2008, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers drew up a new regulation
draft on the matter and, after several steps of evaluation in front of the European Commission, finally adopted the new regulation with decree 31/2009,
establishing, among other things, the illegal circulation of all media lacking
the label since 2000.

The Decree 31/2009 was immediately brought to court by “Edizioni Master”, that filed a case at the Italian Administrative Court (TAR), but didn’t succeed in obtaining the annulment of such regulation.

With its judgment, the Council of State, while declaring void the provision
contained in such regulation to retroactively claim payments before the year
2000, has confirmed the validity of all other prescriptions contained in Decree
31/2009, and thus reasserted the obligation to affix the SIAE label on all type
of medias attached to magazines.”