Regulation Of Music Platform’s Predatory Bidding Of Exclusive Licenese

The exclusive licensing model of music copyright has long been criticized for monopoly.The legal nature of exclusive licensing and how to regulate exclusive licensing have been discussed for many years in antitrust circles and social media.Exclusive authorization is the product of the development of China’s digital music industry,which has a positive effect of "protecting intellectual property rights" and "improving transaction efficiency".The widespread application of exclusive authorization not only promotes the expansion of China’s music industry,but also promotes the prosperity and development of the entertainment industry.From the standpoint of civil Code and copyright law,exclusive license has its legitimate legal basis and should not be adjusted for the anti-monopoly law.The anti-monopoly law needs to pay attention to whether a large number of music works are exclusively licensed to the same music platform will have a negative impact on market competition and social efficiency.According to the punishment document made by the State Administration of Market Supervision on Tencent Music’s acquisition of China Music Group’s equity,the most prominent problem in China’s digital music industry at present is that copyright resources are excessively concentrated in the hands of Tencent Music.When the vast majority of high-quality exclusive audio sources are concentrated in the hands of a certain music platform,it is very likely to bring the platform the ability to raise prices in the downstream market,resulting in the downstream market "refuse to deal" and "unfair high price trading" and other operators abuse the monopoly behavior of dominant power.Previous studies only discussed how to restrict the application of exclusive authorization from the perspective of exclusive authorization itself,and one-sided attention was paid to the monopoly behavior in the downstream market,while ignoring whether the process of music platform obtaining exclusive authorization in the upstream market was legal.Without separating the exclusive authorization behavior from the dynamic process of obtaining exclusive authorization,it is difficult to fundamentally solve the problem.This paper taking the way of music platform obtaining exclusive authorization as the research object,this paper focuses on the negative impact of music platform on the downstream communication market in the process of obtaining exclusive authorization from upstream copyright seller,and finds that the root cause of copyright resource concentration damaging market competition is that music platform adopts the anti-competitive means of predatory purchasing to obtain market dominance.Predatory buying refers to the music platform as a buyer of copyright,at a "high price that competitors cannot afford" to buy the necessary raw materials,until most of the competitors exit the market to achieve market dominance.This is no different from the situation where the seller sells at a lower price than the cost,attracts consumers at a lower price than other sellers can bear,and occupies the market share.Both are anti-competitive means that exchange long-term interests for short-term interests at the expense of short-term interests.This means determines that the actor will abuse his dominant power to recover the "price" after gaining a dominant position.Once the perpetrator succeeds in plundering,it will cause long-term damage to market competition and consumer welfare.Both the seller’s low price sale and the buyer’s high price purchase of raw materials are predatory pricing in essence,but there are some differences in the subject and objective performance of the two,both of which should be prohibited by the anti-monopoly law.However,China’s anti-monopoly law has always understood predatory pricing only from the perspective of sellers’ operators,one-sided attention to the seller’s behavior and limited to the literal meaning of "price below cost",and did not pay attention to the behavior of buyers’ operators.It is precisely because of the defects in the 22 predatory pricing regulation laws of the Anti-Monopoly Law that it is difficult to prohibit the music platform as a buyer from predatory purchase of exclusive music sources in the upstream copyright licensing market,which leads to serious copyright monopoly problems in the music industry.After finding that the root of the problem lies in predatory buying,this paper further proposes how to regulate predatory buying by means of our current anti-monopoly law,so as to fundamentally solve the problem...