Protection against unfair competition

Unfair competition is a fairly wide-ranging concept and can consist of a wide variety of manifestations, but today we will consider unfair competition, which is carried out by violating the integrity of business reputation. This happens both between legal entities and between individual entrepreneurs.
It will be best to consider the situation in question using an example. Let's imagine that your entrepreneurial activity consists in the production of certain goods and the provision of services. Services and goods are advertised, for example, on social networks such as "Instagram" and "Facebook". But one day, you or the employees of your company notice how negative and derogatory information about goods, services, or persons related to the company is being distributed on these platforms. We are talking about cases when information of the specified nature is distributed by representatives of enterprises that conduct their activities in the same direction as your company, provide identical services, produce a similar product on the market.

The information disseminated by your competitors with the aim of discrediting the business entity mostly consists of the dissemination of false, incomplete or out of context information about the quality of goods and the quality of service provision.

For example, an unscrupulous competitor spreads information about the fact that your goods and services are of poor quality, expressing not just his subjective opinion about the goods or services, but without any justification begins to turn to personal insults, attributing negative qualities to your goods or services that they are not endowed with , emphasizes that your goods and services are almost the worst on the market, despite the fact that there is a large circle of consumers and satisfied customers, it can also be groundless slander about unqualified employees.

At the same time, an unscrupulous competitor attributes to himself mostly spreads information about himself like: "Use only our services, we are the best, our quality is of the highest level, we are about to become the market leaders, everyone who has achieved real success in an industry like ours is a fraud, low-quality, etc....", however, consumers should generally avoid such entrepreneurs, because whoever "Screams" the most about their excellence and descends to the level of "Watering with mud" of their competitors actually has little to show for themselves in a certain market of goods and services.

SO HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM UNFAIR COMPETITION THROUGH VIOLATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO INTEGRITY OF BUSINESS REPUTATION?

Of course, the best option would be to resolve the case at the pre-trial stage. However, if the negotiations were unsuccessful, or the dishonest competitor does not want to give up his negative intentions, then it is worth applying to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine with a corresponding application, adding all the necessary evidence confirming the fact of unfair competition, it can be relevant video materials, photos, texts from social networks, etc...

If the said application is approved, the disseminator of false information will pay a considerable fine.

Also, the victim of the illegal actions of competitors has the right to file a lawsuit in court, where he will have the opportunity to collect, including, compensation for moral damage.