In order to fully leverage the exemplary leading role of typical cases and help form a market order of benign competition, the Supreme People's Court recently released the 2026 Typical Cases of Anti Unfair Competition by the People's Courts. This batch of cases involves both traditional fields and emerging fields such as artificial intelligence and platform economy, aiming to continuously improve competition adjudication rules and provide strong judicial services and guarantees for accelerating the construction of a unified national market and promoting high-quality economic development.
Currently, the competition methods in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, short video, and platform economy are constantly changing, and traditional forms of competition are also innovating. The number of civil disputes related to unfair competition continues to grow. Therefore, the trial work of anti unfair competition cases must accurately grasp the dialectical relationship between upholding justice and innovation. It is necessary to take the core values and basic purposes of the Anti Unfair Competition Law as the constant standard for judgment, and also keep pace with the times to continuously improve the ability to respond to new challenges and solve new problems. The typical cases released this time not only clarify the arbitration ideas for trademark name confusion disputes, but also provide samples of new competition dispute cases such as using data pollution for drainage, reflecting the distinctive characteristics of judicial work that adheres to the unity of integrity and innovation. They have a demonstrative and leading role in carrying out similar case trials, deepening relevant theoretical research, and clarifying the boundaries of compliance and legality.
For example, in case one, the dispute over trademark infringement and unfair competition between a marketing company and a jewelry company, a commercial firm, etc., focuses on whether registering the use of a name similar to someone else's registered trademark constitutes unfair competition. Legally speaking, the exclusive right to register a trademark and the right to register a company name in accordance with the law are both civil rights confirmed through legal procedures, but they are registered by the trademark management department and the market supervision department respectively, and are protected by different legal systems. In practice, it is not uncommon for different operators' trademarks and names to collide. There is a view that if an operator uses someone else's trademark text as their business name, but uses the full name of the enterprise in its external activities without highlighting the name separately, it usually does not constitute unfair competition. In this case, the Supreme People's Court clearly stated that if a commercial sign that is similar to another person's registered trademark is registered as a company name, even if it is used in a standardized manner, it is still not enough to avoid confusion, and the registration and use behavior should be deemed as unfair competition. This case clarifies the judgment approach for conflicts between trademark and trade name rights, clarifies the criteria for identifying such unfair competition behavior, and is conducive to unifying the judgment standards of people's courts at all levels, guiding operators to register and use enterprise names legally.
Case six, a dispute over trademark infringement and unfair competition between a technology company and a software company, is a new type of case of "false praise of peers and true promotion of oneself". The defendant used artificial intelligence technology to generate a batch of evaluation articles containing other company trademark names and software product introductions, and published them on their own website. They also set links to their own products before and after the articles. The court held that the purpose of this behavior was to use the natural search rules of search engines to make these articles searchable by the public, and then click on the self owned product links set in the articles to achieve the purpose of traffic diversion. This will lower the quality of consumer information retrieval, reduce the plaintiff's trading opportunities and business interests, and also cause data pollution, disrupting the competitive order. In the end, the court ruled that the defendant violated the principles of good faith and business ethics stipulated in the Unfair Competition Law, constituting unfair competition. In the typical competition violation cases released by the Supreme People's Court over the years, this case is the first one that has been clearly classified as "data pollution". Prior to this, judicial practice had already dealt with behaviors such as artificially brushing orders and brushing positive reviews that had similar harmful consequences. Although the term 'data pollution' is currently not a legal term and has no clear legal definition, relevant parties should take the release of this case as an opportunity to continue deepening research on legal issues related to data pollution, exploring practical measures to regulate data pollution, and further strengthening the ecological governance of online information content.
Case Seven "Unfair Competition Dispute Case between a Technology Company, an Internet Company, and a Media Company" is a case of "false advertising methods". The plaintiff is an organization that has obtained the commercial use authorization of the short video of the artist Huang and is responsible for the operation of relevant content. The defendant used technical means to tamper with Huang's live video tape, which was edited and uploaded to the network to promote a facial mask. The court held that the defendant changed the video voice, so that consumers mistakenly thought that this facial mask was recommended by Mr. Huang, which brought commercial advantages to itself and damaged the legitimate rights and interests of the plaintiff to compete based on live broadcast content, thus constituting unfair competition of false publicity. This typical case vividly illustrates that the core feature of false advertising does not specifically refer to the product being advertised as not being true to its name, but also includes the unauthorized use of others' commercial resources for marketing that may lead to misidentification; The elements of personality rights such as portrait and voice can be legally transformed into commercial rights with competitive value, and are protected by the Anti Unfair Competition Law.
Overall, these typical cases emphasize the balance between regulation and development, technological empowerment and public interest protection, adhere to the stable and cautious application of the general provisions of the Anti Unfair Competition Law and related fallback regulations, and abide by the principle of unity between upholding justice and innovation in judicial work. This is conducive to promoting the upward development of science and technology, ensuring safety and controllability, and helping to accelerate the construction of a unified national market and promote high-quality economic development. (Outlook New Era)