Record! The car blogger maliciously slandered, and the court finally decided: compensate the car company 5 million yuan

On August 26, the WeChat public account "NI+ Planet", certified as the "Dongfeng Motor Co., Ltd. (Dongfeng Nissan) Trade Union Committee", announced on the 25th that Dongfeng Motor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Dongfeng Motor") won the second-instance case against Beijing Cheqianli Interactive Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Cheqianli") in the second instance of the online tort liability dispute, and the court ordered Che Qianli to delete the relevant video and publicly apologize, while compensating 5 million yuan.

Source: WeChat public account "NI+ Planet"

Dongfeng Motor said that from August to November 2021, "Oxcart Lab" intensively released 53 negative videos against the new generation of X-Jun through its Douyin account, which clearly insulted, slandered, disparaged and vilified Xinqijun in the content, title and comments, which had a great negative impact on the model image of Dongfeng Motor and Xinqijun. After repeated fruitless negotiations with the "Oxcart Lab", Dongfeng Motor sued the court.

The court of first instance accepted the case in January 2022, and after investigation and evidence collection, ruled in favor of Dongfeng Nissan in December 2022, Beijing Che Qianli deleted the video involved in the case and publicly apologized, while compensating Dongfeng Nissan for economic losses of 5 million yuan.

In the judgment, the court held that by publishing the video content, Beijing Cheqianli gained attention that might be converted into sales opportunities for the company, objectively disparaging Dongfeng Nissan's products and preventing them from forming transactions, as well as incurring business losses, which constituted an infringement of Dongfeng Nissan's goodwill.

The court pointed out that automobile companies need to invest huge amounts of scientific research funds to develop products, and if the illegal purpose of technology companies to prevent competitors from obtaining trading opportunities at a negligible cost and slander, and is imitated by unfair competition subjects, the order of market competition will be disrupted, and opportunistic vicious competition such as malicious slander, disparagement and slander will run rampant, and the court should seriously stop such behaviors and use legal coercion to restore market competition to fairness. According to the relevant regulations, the above-mentioned technology company was sentenced to delete all videos and comments and publicly apologize for 30 days. According to the duration and scope of the content released by the above-mentioned technology companies, 5 million yuan was awarded damages.

Beijing Che Qianli appealed to the Intermediate People's Court against the verdict. The court of second instance opened the case in February 2023, and after investigation and evidence collection, ruled in August 2023 that "the appeal was rejected and the original judgment was upheld", and the judgment of the second instance was final.

The Wuhan Intermediate People's Court of Hubei Province held that the technology company slandered Dongfeng's business reputation or product reputation in response to the clearly derogatory words and unverified negative information in the series of videos released by Dongfeng Nissan. Moreover, the intensive and continuous publication of negative content by technology companies through Douyin accounts has deviated from the basic objective facts and tolerance limits, and exceeded the boundaries of online freedom of expression and the scope of normal public opinion criticism and supervision, and this illegal act will inevitably cause damage to Dongfeng's reputation and adversely affect its business environment.

According to the official website, Dongfeng Motor was established on June 9, 2003 and is a subsidiary of Dongfeng Group (0489. HK) and Nissan Motor Corporation jointly formed a large-scale automotive joint venture with a registered capital of RMB 16.7 billion, each of which owns 50% of the shares. Dongfeng Nissan is a subsidiary of Dongfeng Motor and X-Trail is an automobile brand of Dongfeng Nissan.

According to Red Star Capital Bureau, as of the afternoon of August 26, there were still more than ten "evaluation" videos about Xinqijun under the account of "Oxcart Lab", involving "thin paint and uneven spraying", "prompt that the window is not closed after the vehicle is locked", "the wiring harness is unprotected, the new car parts are rusty", "the three-cylinder new car loses to the four-cylinder 7-year-old car", etc., with the number of likes ranging from thousands to 80,000.

Screenshot from Douyin App

As of press time, "Oxcart Lab" did not respond, and its latest video posted on August 23 gathered many netizens under it, and the number of followers on the Douyin platform was 1.162 million.

Xiaobian noted that the aforementioned Dongfeng Motor said that the victory of the Che Qianli infringement case "set a record for the highest amount of self-media infringement compensation in the history of 5 million yuan." ”

According to First Finance and Economics, an insider of a car company told reporters that the current new energy vehicle market is growing rapidly, and Tesla, BYD, NIO, Li Auto and other car companies have received the attention of public opinion and the public. Some brands have their own "hot search physique", and a little wind and grass can attract overwhelming attention, which is mixed with a lot of subjective malicious or ulterior motives.

Similar cases have occurred several times in the past two years. In the second half of 2022, Tesla also took an Internet celebrity blogger in Zhejiang to court for a similar reason and claimed 5 million yuan. The court ruled in favor of Tesla and ordered the above-mentioned blogger to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan in damages to Tesla. Earlier, domestic car companies such as BYD, Great Wall Motor, and Changan Automobile also sued some Internet celebrity bloggers, claiming claims ranging from 1 million yuan to 5 million yuan on the grounds that false and malicious content infringed on reputation rights. BYD has even set up an online reporting platform to collect clues to crack down on online rumors.

According to the Red Star Capital Bureau, since the beginning of this year, a number of car companies, including Li Auto, Xpeng Motors, Leap Auto, and NIO, have opened the official Weibo of the Ministry of Justice, announcing the prosecution of some automobile self-media. On July 24 and 25, BYD and Great Wall Motor successively announced that they will sue some automobile self-media, with a maximum claim of 5 million yuan.

According to Yicai, Wu Yiyan, an expert at the China Communications Think Tank, believes that in order to pursue short-term profits in traffic, individual marketing accounts do not hesitate to "attract fans" by smearing and slandering for profit; Such operations are not only an infringement of the normal rights and interests of enterprises, but also a potential infringement of the public's rational cognition of the brand; Enterprises actively fight back, which is conducive to maintaining a "clean environment" of the network.

A partner of a law firm told reporters that the video content of Beijing Che Qianli on the Internet did exceed the scope of normal commercial evaluation, and had constituted infringement of reputation rights and goodwill. At the same time, he believes that although the award of 5 million yuan in compensation is relatively rare in the industry, it can play a certain warning role in the current chaos of some Internet celebrity bloggers using traffic to seek improper benefits.

Editor|Cheng Peng Gai Yuanyuan

Proofreading | Duan Lian

Cover image source: Red Star Capital Bureau screenshot

Daily economic news is synthesized from Red Star Capital Bureau and Yicai