Court case 16 W 37/20 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2020)

The complainant was a doctor listed on the defendant's evaluation website. In February 2020, the defendant informed the claimant that he had discovered that positive assessments, so-called false assessments, had been published on his profile and asked him to clarify this situation. The sanction for the lack of explanation was supposed to be information for users of the portal in the form of a warning on the doctor's profile that reviews had been purchased. In the correspondence exchanged, the doctor denied that there were false assessments on his profile, but the defendant found it not sufficient. The defendant then posted a warning notice on the applicant's profile. The plaintiff sought a temporary injunction to prohibit the marking of his profile with a warning sign and the display of the text of the warning. The Regional Court dismissed the application. The applicant challenged that decision and filed an immediate appelation. The Regional Court did not remedy the complaint and referred the matter to the Higher Regional Court for a decision. Does the public interest invoked by the defendant in connection with the publication of the warning outweigh the interests of the applicant? Has the defendant infringed the provisions of the GermanCivil Code in conjunction with the Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, and could not invoke the press exception for the publication of the warning? The Higher Regional Court declared the appeal to be unsuccessful. It held that the plaintiff has no right against the defendant to stop the labelling of his profile with a warning sign and the display of the warning sign.