Workers’ Daily News (Reporter Zou Yiran) Watching live webcasts has now become a daily pastime for many people. However, the "golden anchor" with many fans may be "wet". Recently, the Internet Court in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province made a judgment on a dispute case involving infringement of the right to disseminate works information on the Internet and unfair competition, and a software service company compensated 1 million yuan.
Plaintiff Aauto Quicker Company is the main operator of "Aauto Quicker APP". The defendant company is a service provider of live broadcast field control software. According to the original report, the live broadcast field control software service provided by the defendant can centrally control a large number of mobile phones, and batch use the "Aauto Quicker" account to praise, give gifts, comment and pay attention to the designated live broadcast room. The anchor who uses this software can manipulate the "fans" in the live broadcast room artificially, thus creating false popularity and popularity. The defendant’s behavior violated consumers’ right to know and choose, endangered public interests and constituted unfair competition. Therefore, the defendant was required to immediately stop unfair competition, immediately cancel all relevant Aauto Quicker accounts used by him to increase false popularity, and compensate for the loss of 4.56 million yuan.
The defendant argued that the plaintiff’s subject qualification was flawed and he had no right to file a lawsuit in this case. The defendant has taken the initiative to delete the controversial information of the website involved, stopped the litigation-related business activities and successively refunded the users. There is no malicious infringement, and the plaintiff has no right to cancel the relevant accounts. The alleged infringing software did not cause great economic losses to the plaintiff, and the number of accounts in Aauto Quicker, the number of live broadcasts and the profit made by the plaintiff were not true.
The court held that Aauto Quicker Company obtained data such as user visits, likes and comments by operating Aauto Quicker software, formed the time and stickiness of users’ use of Aauto Quicker software and products, gathered user traffic and realized benefits through traffic, all of which belonged to Aauto Quicker’s competitive advantage, and such commercial interests should be protected by law.
The defendant used the alleged infringing software to help Aauto Quicker anchor to make false propaganda about the number of attention, fans, likes and comments on its live broadcast, which led to obvious misleading of consumers, wrong cognition of fictitious data and user evaluation, affected the authenticity of data on Aauto Quicker platform, destroyed the algorithm evaluation and recommendation system of Aauto Quicker platform live broadcast room and the real and honest interactive ecosystem created by Aauto Quicker software, harmed the legitimate rights and interests of other operators and consumers, and disrupted the market competition order.
Judging from this case, the live broadcast field control software has evolved from the operation of cultivating virtual accounts in batches without real names in the initial stage to the centralized use for "brushing powder" and brushing amount of webcasts after obtaining the authorization of real accounts in batches on the platform, which increases the difficulty and cost of platform governance while facilitating the fraud of live broadcast traffic, and also nourishes the black and gray industrial chain of online account leasing and trading, and should strengthen regulation according to law.
In the end, the court ruled that the defendant’s behavior constituted unfair competition and ordered him to stop unfair competition and compensate for the loss of 1 million yuan.
