Chaoyang District People's Court in Beijing ruled on April 26, the World IP Day, that Beijing Qihoo, Qizhi Software and Sanji Unlimited, for having damaged Tencent's commercial reputation, shall remove all right infringing contents on the 360 website, declare thereon in the homepage of 360 website and Legal Daily, for 30 consecutive days, to erase the negative impact of their conducts on Tencent, and pay 400,000 yuan to the plaintiff as damage.
The Beijing district court dismissed Qihoo 360's claim that the software monitoring functions of QQ 2010, a Chinese counterpart of ICQ, "possibly involved in users' privacy files", holding that QQ 2010 constituted no infringement of users' privacy.
The case was filed by Tencent on Oct. 14 last year, accusing Qihoo 360 of unfair competition with its "privacy protector" software. Qihoo 360 was also blamed for monitoring users' instance chat on Tencent QQ, misleading and cheating users into believing that the plaintiff's software "stealthily peers into users' privacy", and thus seriously damaging the plaintiff's commercial reputation.
The court also held that the strongly sentimental terms Qihoo 360 used in denouncing Tencent QQ, such as "gangster acts" and "moves against the Heaven's wish", are negative comments and thus have misleading consequences. Given that the denunciations were groundless and against the commercial principles of honesty and credibility, the defendant's wordings, in failing to comply with the requirements for safeguarding a reasonable competition order, were aimed to offset the plaintiff's competitive advantages.
Qihoo 360's privacy protector software, with its V1.0 Beta version, was also ordered not to be updated and released.
(By Zengsen Wang, ChinaIP)
