Vistaprint and its advertising partner PEARL declared under the obligation to disclose information and liable for damages vis-à-vis Unitedprint
ME Newswire / Business Wire
RADEBEUL, Germany - Thursday, October 10th 2013
Online printing company unitedprint.com SE has been exonerated in three final verdicts of the Higher regional court of Dresden (Oberlandesgericht Dresden), along with its subsidiary unitedprint.com Deutschland GmbH (www.print24.com) in a case against Vistaprint and its advertising partner PEARL. This comes in the wake of several verdicts handed down by Dresden district court (Landgericht Dresden), which established that Vistaprint had obtained an unfair advantage on the market by using underhand commercial practices involving its advertising partner PEARL. This, it decided, amounted to anti-competitive behavior. In pronouncing these verdicts, the district court had already found that Vistaprint and PEARL were under the obligation to disclose information and liable to Unitedprint for damages independently of one another. The appeals lodged by Vistaprint following the Higher regional court’s decisions of 26.09.2013 were to no avail. The decision was declared final.
Vistaprint must now explain the degree to which its own sales were boosted by so-called ‘thank you loyalty offers’ and ‘complimentary offers’ passed off as orders already placed with the company. Owing to the anti-competitive advertising it habitually embarked on using various coupons offering holders fictitious price reductions, Vistaprint must disclose the precise number of coupons sold and the exact number of orders placed using them. PEARL must reveal the extent to which it distributed such anti-competitive coupons as part of its dealings with Vistaprint. Furthermore, Unitedprint will be compensated for the damages inflicted upon it by such illicit practices.
unitedprint.com won a case against Vistaprint last year at the Federal Supreme Court, along with its subsidiary print24 GmbH, involving a ground-breaking dispute over patents. The FSC pronounced its final decision on 22.03.2012 in this longstanding dispute, in favor of print24, declaring the controversial Vistaprint Patent EP 0 852 359 B 1 null and void. The contentious patent described a procedure for creating, processing and transmitting templates via the internet.
The online printing portal easyprint.us, a brand of unitedprint.com SE, makes use of several free design and photography templates in an innovative design tool. Easyprint is aimed at small businesses, families and individuals who are intuitively creative and thus able to generate designs online and print them professionally.
Contacts
unitedprint.com SE
Maria Lehmann
Social Media Specialist
Social Media Marketing
Telephone +49-351-27225388
maria.lehmann@unitedprint.com
www.unitedprint.com
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