Hysome Cases | Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co., Ltd. v. a store department in Xingyang City for an unfair competition dispute

Case description:

The plaintiff discovered that through the website involved in the case, the defendant provided cheating services such as numbers of fan, short video views, likes, and comments to users of the Kuaishou platform, and earned fees from such cheating services. In order to stop the infringement and safeguard legitimate rights and interests, in September 2020, Kuaishou Company entrusted our lawyers Sun Binyan and Zhang Mengyu to file a lawsuit on its behalf, requiring the defendant to bear economic losses and reasonable expenses.

The focus of the dispute in this case is whether the defendant's conduct in the case constituted unfair competition, and if so, what kind of liability the defendant shall bear.

The court of first instance in this case held that there was no significant increase in the short video data after purchasing the services for cheating broadcast volume and likes, and that the available evidence was insufficient to prove that the defendant conducted unfair competition, so it ruled to dismiss all claimed proposed by Kuaishou Company. After the judgment was made, our client appealed. In November 2022, the court of second instance determined that although the cheating act involved in the case had not brought actual consequences, the act was illegal. The reasonable expenses such as lawyers' fees and forensic fees paid by Kuaishou Company to stop such acta shall also be recognized as actual losses. On this basis, the court of first instance corrected the judgment of the court of first instance and ruled that the defendant shall bear the economic losses suffered by the plaintiff therefrom.

In this case, our lawyers not only further protected the rights and interests of customers, but also discussed the “damage” caused by false publicity under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law at a deeper level, providing substantial assistance in determining infringement in this type of case.