Social media, fake reviews and 'suggestive' videos are unfair competition
The Court of Rome: yes to freedom of criticism but there must be respect for truth and reputation
Key points
Criticising the competitor usingsocial channels and platforms is permissible, as long as one does not resort tofake reviews or video messages edited in a suggestive and/or misleading form.
The Court of Rome, XVII Civil Section, has closed the dispute forunfair competition initiated by Reparadora Italia (GoBravo) against Difesa Debitori, a case that arose last year when the Spanish company took its Veneto-based competitor to court, accusing it of 221 fake reviews. The party's consultation found that only nine of the online 'critics' had been customers of GoBravo and only 17 reviewers traceable to individuals existing and active on the web.
After the injunction, which was granted as a matter of urgency by the Court in October 2024, a settlement agreement had been reached between the parties with the termination of the interlocutory proceedings and the absorption of all issues related to the reviews published on the web platformTrustpilot.
The latest developments
In the new order issued in recent weeks, the Court reaffirmed the qualification of "unfair competition" of the contested conduct, on the assumption that the dispute involves 'entrepreneurs' and not, as defendants, mere reviewers/haters. According to the judges in the dispute over loans and financing that was the subject of the case, the narration of the entrepreneur 'poisoned' against the competing company, in order to denounce its incorrectness, was 'carried out in a manner directed not at giving useful information to the customers to whom the commercial activity of the companies involved was directed, but with the aim of bringing discredit to the competing company'.
Emblematic would be the videos in which, through the editing of telephone calls made by the defendant, who presented himself as a potential customer of the claimed company, "words or film clips are inserted in such a way as to explicitly suggest the idea of a seriously superficial or even fraudulent activity of the competing company, certainly going beyond the limits of continence and constituting conduct capable of bringing the claimed company into disrepute". Good manners and fair play, if not love of truth, are cogent rules even in the wonderful online world.
