[Significance]

With the rise of the Internet economy, there are more and more activities taking advantage of the “notification-deletion” mechanism adopted by the Internet platforms for a quick handling of the infringement complaints, and infringing others’ legitimate rights and interests. This case clarified that it constituted unfair competition to make a malicious complaint against another undertaking’s goods through the complaint mechanism of an e-commerce platform and to make those goods deleted by the platform and lose the opportunities to be sold. It could effectively curb the filing of malicious complaints and maintain a good order of market competition.

[Case Summary]

On March 28, 2016, Tong Jiangang filed an infringement complaint to Taobao on the ground that the explosion-proof pressure cooker sold in Xu Xianben’s store on Taobao infringed his design patent, and submitted the Design Patent Certificate, the Design Patent Evaluation Report, etc. online.

On April 7, 2016, Taobao recognized that the complaint made by Tong Jiangang was valid and deleted the link of the products being complained about. It was later found that Tong Jiangang altered the key content in the Design Patent Evaluation Report which was submitted when filing the complaint. Specifically, he maliciously changed “Preliminary conclusion: The whole design does not meet the requirements for the grant of a patent right” to “Preliminary conclusion: No defect has been found in the whole design that does not meet the requirements for the grant of a patent right”, and deleted “the design does not comply with the provisions of Article 23.2 of the Patent Law”. Xu Xianben brought a civil case before a court and requested the court to order the defendant to make a public apology and to compensate him RMB 500,000 Yuan.

[Decision]

The court held that the defendant Tong Jiangang knew that the application for design patent he filed was not granted with a patent right. Still, he altered the conclusion in the Patent Evaluation Report and used forged evidence to maliciously complain about the products sold by Xu Xianben which are similar products of his. Eventually, the link of the complained products was deleted by the platform. His activity violated the universally accepted code of business ethics and caused damages to the plaintiff since the plaintiff Xu Xianben was unable to normally carry out its business operations and suffer from losses, and constituted unfair competition.

Hangzhou Yuhang District People’s Court of Zhejiang Province ruled, after trial, that the malicious complaint made by the defendant Tong Jiangang constituted unfair competition and ordered the defendant Tong Jiangang to compensate the plaintiff Xu Xianben RMB 20,000 Yuan for the economic losses including reasonable expenses. The first instance judgment had then become effective.