A website was sentenced to pay 1.05 million yuan for "stealing comments"
News from this newspaper (Reporter Lu Yue) On March 29, the People's Court of Chaoyang District, Beijing held a public hearing and pronounced a new type of unfair competition dispute.
An Internet company was sentenced to pay 1.05 million yuan in compensation for embezzling other people's data to drain traffic.
The plaintiff, a Beijing Information Technology Co., Ltd., claimed that a website operated by it mainly serves the acceptance of complaints from automobile consumers. After consumers submit complaints about automobile quality problems on the website, the website will contact the automobile manufacturers and urge them to solve them.
Since its establishment in 2014, the website has processed about 390,000 consumer complaints.
In June 2021, the plaintiff found that more than 52,000 consumer complaint information on the website operated by a company in Beijing was the same or similar to the information displayed on the plaintiff's website, and the date of the complaint was later than or equal to the date on the plaintiff's website, The plaintiff's watermark is even included in the drawings of some of the complaint information.
In addition, the complaint process published on the defendant's website includes six steps, including "publishing a complaint," "commissioner review," "company processing," "result review," "satisfaction scoring," and "completion." Since 2015, the number of complaint numbers displayed on the website has been There are more than 110,000 complaints, but most of the complaints are in the "result review" or "enterprise processing" state, and there is no complaint information in the "completed" state.
The plaintiff believes that the number of complaints on the defendant's website and the progress of its handling are fictitious.
The plaintiff requested the court to order the defendant to stop the unfair competition behavior, publicly eliminate the impact, and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 1.05 million yuan.
During the trial, the defendant company failed to submit the reasonable source of the above-mentioned complaint information, nor did it make a reasonable explanation for the same or similar complaint information.
The court held that the more than 50,000 pieces of user complaint information claimed by the plaintiff were data information formed through long-term operation, management, and maintenance, which could bring specific social and economic benefits to the plaintiff, which belonged to its market competitive advantage and should be received by the plaintiff. Legal protection.
The defendant's use of more than 50,000 complaint information from the plaintiff's website on its website is essentially an act of improperly using the complaint information on the plaintiff's website and illegally appropriating the information as its own, violating the principle of good faith and generally recognized business ethics. The actual loss caused to the plaintiff should be regulated by the general provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law.
The court held that the defendant's falsification of the number of complaints and processing progress on its website could easily cause the relevant public to misunderstand its website's operating scale, influence, and service efficiency, and also constitute an unfair competition act of false propaganda.
In the end, the court ruled that the defendant should stop the unfair competition involved, eliminate the impact, and compensate the plaintiff 1.05 million yuan.
Lu Yue