The Spanish Centre for Reprographic Rights (“CEDRO”) filed a complaint seeking €1.1 million in compensation for the use of content by Google on its Discover aggregation service between 2016 and 2020. Experts from FTI Consulting’s subsidiary Compass Lexecon were instructed by Google to prepare an expert report for the Mercantile Court No. 16 of Madrid (“the Court”) evaluating CEDRO’s claim from an economic perspective and provide evidence before the court.
On December 20, 2021, the Court dismissed CEDRO’s claim. The €1.1 million infringement claim was dismissed and Google’s usage of the content on Google Discover was upheld as within the standard.
The Court agreed that the content shown on Google Discover did not qualify as a “non-significant fragment” of journalistic work, which Spain’s intellectual property laws seek to protect.
Favourably citing the opinions of the Compass Lexecon report, the Court found issues with the claim’s compensation calculations, both because of the tariff applied and because of the calculation methodology put forward by CEDRO.
The Compass Lexecon report and testimony demonstrated how the tariff that CEDRO used to calculate the claimed compensation was based on several unfounded and incorrect assumptions and how its estimate of affected traffic was not methodologically sound.
Compass Lexecon experts prepared an expert report for the Court evaluating CEDRO’s claim from an economic perspective.
Compass Lexecon experts provided evidence before the Court showing that, due to its minimal length, the content was classified as comprising single words akin to online search results.
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