Penalty for breaching competition law is four times higher than forecast as Brussels looks to send message to tech firms
Apple has been fined €1.8bn (£1.5bn) by the EU after an investigation found it had limited competition from music streaming services such as Spotify.
The fine is nearly four times higher than expected as the European Commission attempts to show it will act decisively on tech companies who abuse their dominant position in the market for online services.
Continue reading...Aarhus court hears he may have profited from artificially generated playbacks, in case thought to be first of its kind
A Danish man has gone on trial in the city of Aarhus over accusations that he fraudulently made 4.38m kroner (more than £502,000) in royalties on music streaming sites, in what is thought to be the first such trial of its kind.
Prosecutors allege that the 53-year-old profited from streams of 689 pieces of music across services including Spotify, Apple Music and YouSee Musik. They say the huge numbers of streams required to generate that amount of money could not have been generated by genuine users and that unauthorised techniques were likely to have been deployed instead. The alleged fraud is understood to have happened between 2013 and 2019.
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