Within a year, a company had issued over 240 warnings against competitors, mostly relating to errors in information obligations for service providers on the internet, such as missing links to the ODR platform. The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt a.M. has now classified these warnings as an abuse of rights. The warned company, which had defended itself, therefore does not have to bear any costs for the warning. The judges considered this to be an abuse of rights because the company issuing the warning was only active “temporarily, if at all, and in very specific segments of the travel agent market”. This led to the conclusion that the company was primarily interested in the warnings as an additional source of income. The warnings had also been issued for infringements that only had very little impact on the warning company itself. The high number of warnings alone therefore speaks for the abuse of rights
(OLG Frankfurt a.M., judgment of 12.11.2020, Ref.: 6 U 210/19).

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