A pet company sued ＂Public Comment＂ for deleting bad reviews, which was rejected by the court.

　　Xinhua News Agency, Shanghai, April 25th (Reporter Huang Anqi) Shanghai No.1 Pet Co., Ltd. sued the organizer of Dianping.com because the consumer’s "bad review" demanded that Dianping.com be deleted. Shanghai Changning District People’s Court recently made a first-instance judgment on this case, rejecting all the claims of the plaintiff’s pet company. The court held that although the words used in the "bad reviews" of consumers involved in the case violated the network ethics, they did not constitute a reputational infringement on merchants.

　　In October, 2015, a pet company in Shanghai sued the court, claiming that in April, 2015, it was found that there were malicious, untrue, even insulting and defamatory comments on its pet shop in the comments of Dianping.com, and it contacted Shanghai Hantao Information Consulting Co., Ltd., the organizer of Dianping.com, and requested to delete the above comments. However, Hantao Company replied that it could not be deleted. In July and August, 2015, malicious comments that seriously damaged the goodwill of pet shops and seriously insulted employees’ personality reappeared on relevant web pages. Although they were requested to be deleted after several negotiations, Hantao Company still ignored them. The pet company believed that the above malicious comments seriously violated its reputation right, and appealed to the court to order Hantao Company to immediately delete the above comments and compensate the economic losses, attorney fees, notary fees and so on totaling 61,500 yuan.

　　Hantao Company believes that it has no subjective intention or behavior to infringe the plaintiff’s reputation right, and the relevant comments are uploaded by netizens themselves, reflecting free will, which also belongs to the supervision of public opinion and freedom of speech. The company has not made any editing, and the comments do not contain malicious comments, which does not constitute an insult or slander to the plaintiff. Therefore, it does not agree to delete them and requests the court to reject all the plaintiff’s applications.

　　In December 2015 and February 2016, the court held two public hearings to hear the case. The court found that Hantao Company was the organizer of Dianping.com.. Since 2011, registered users of Dianping.com have published comments on the platform of Dianping.com, including "killing people for money", "harming nature and justice", "all praise is due", "no medical ethics", "black shop" and "beast". Recently, the court made the above-mentioned first-instance judgment on this case of reputation infringement dispute caused by online "bad review".