Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty in proving economic losses when Dianping sued Aibang.com. Today, let’s see what changes happened when Baidu was sued a few years later.

Market environment during the same period On September 25, 2012, Dianping and AutoNavi signed a data cooperation agreement, agreeing on matters such as data exchange and integration through open API interfaces.

In January 2014, Baidu officially announced that it would fully acquire Nuomi.com.

In February 2014, the Beijing News' "Map War: O2O Ecological "Nuclear Change"" analyzed the market competition pattern at that time.

In July 2015, the China Business News "BAT competes with group buying websites Meituan Nuomi and Dianping" tracked the competition among Baidu Nuomi, Meituan and Dianping.

The plaintiff’s Weibo netizen @Dianping and Baidu Map’s official blog asked, “The food section of Baidu Map directly quotes a large number of reviews and introductions from Dianping.com, but only allows users to log in with a Baidu account to comment. What’s going on?” Baidu

The official map blog replied, "Dear, we are now in a cooperative relationship."

The plaintiff claimed that the defendant's behavior was false advertising, but the court did not support it.

The court held that the official WeChat reply could indeed lead to misunderstanding, but not all words and deeds that may lead to misunderstanding constitute false propaganda. This official WeChat reply did not attract public attention. In the era of information explosion, except for the plaintiff who specifically searched for this article for the purpose of litigation,

Weibo, almost no other public reads it.

(The court’s detailed analysis based on the constituent elements can be found in the judgment.) The defendant’s evidence collection was to notarize the designated merchants on Baidu Map to prove that the review information for catering merchants comes from multiple websites; for certain other categories,

Dianping’s information is useless or rarely used.

For example, "hotel" review information mainly comes from websites such as Qunar.com, Ctrip.com, Elong.com, and Tongcheng Travel.com.

The sources of “real estate” information are Soufun.com, Anjuke, Sina Leju and other websites.

The second is to notarize the relevant content of Amap, Tencent Map, and Sogou Map to prove that everyone has a similar business model to Baidu Map and their usage is legitimate.

The plaintiff’s special evidence collection: Jietu Company operates the “City Bar” street view map website, which provides street view maps to Internet users; it calls Baidu Maps through APIs and displays both street view maps and Baidu maps on the website page.

After clicking the "Street View Business", "Catering Services", "Restaurant" and other buttons on the left side of the webpage, a list of restaurants will be displayed. Selecting a restaurant will display the corresponding restaurant information in the Baidu Map window of the website. Click the "

"Details", you can jump to the Baidu map website and see that the merchant has review information from Dianping.com.

The plaintiff believed that it and Baidu constituted the same infringement.

The court held that the infringing information existed in Baidu Maps. Jietu Company only called Baidu Maps through the API. There was no infringing information in its own Street View map. The purpose of the call was simply to point to the review information in Baidu Maps. There was no subjective agreement.

Intention to commit infringement does not constitute concurrent infringement.

Litigation In 2015, Dianping sued Baidu for unfair competition, claiming more than 90 million yuan.

On May 26, 2016, the court of first instance issued the (2015) Pu Min San (Zhi) Chu Zi No. 528 judgment, finding that Baidu constituted unfair competition and should compensate Dianping for economic losses of RMB 3 million. The support rate for the claim amount was only 3.3

%.

Does the plaintiff need to notarize and collect evidence of all infringements one by one?

On the basis of the facts found by the first-instance court, the second-instance court also verified some additional information. For example, in terms of usage ratio, more than 75% of the Baidu Map merchant review information used Dianping review information.

In short, the court held that the plaintiff did not need to obtain evidence one by one for the infringing parts of the massive information to prove that the defendant had used its information on a “large scale”.

Identities are swapped, and the defendant would not do this when defending his own rights.