It‘s easy to be a unfair competition law violator in Germany. Just operate an eBay shop or deal on Amazon’s market place and use their default settings when informing your customers on how long it will take to get the goods delivered to their homes. In all seriousness, that is what the Bremen Court of Appeals has effectively decided in a judgment in early October. Continue reading
Once information is entered into the Internet’s most popular encyclopedia Wikipedia it gains an immense potential of distribution. The high number of users and the easy accessibility in combination with the impression of neutrality an encyclopedia communicates make it highly desirable for companies to be positively depicted in articles about the company itself or its products.
The Higher Regional Court of Munich decided on May 10th, 2012 that positive display of a company’s products in a Wikipedia article that was amended by the director of the company constitutes disguised advertising and thus unfair competition as defined by Section 4 No. 3 UWG (the German Law Against the Unfair Competition). Continue reading