The question of what exactly someone who has been convicted of an omission by a court must do repeatedly leads to legal problems in the context of enforcement disputes. The Chamber Court in Berlin recently clarified what a company must do to prevent a re-publication of an online ad from being prevented.
According to that order, the debtor of a court prohibition order is regularly required to influence his employees accordingly by means of instructions and orders in the particular individual case and to closely monitor compliance. It is not enough simply to inform employees of the content of a title and to ask them to behave appropriately.
This obligation may be particularly relevant in larger companies where different departments may be active. The same applies to contractors undertakings whose actions benefit the debtor economically.
In that regard, it is not sufficient for the debtor to simply inform the distributor of the injunction to comply with the obligation to injunt.
The judgment thus goes d’accord with the decision of the Landgericht Frankfurt on the actions of commercial agents (see this decision) and the decision of the Landgericht Frankenthal on liability for actions of advertising partners (see this article ). This judgment must be distinguished from the recent judgment of the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt on liability for acts of third parties (see this article), since in this case there was no duty of care of the liable undertaking, which was not required to take account of the decision of the Chamber Court, however, was straight at the injunction.
Therefore, one should be very careful in the case of injunction obligations, even if they are not yet legally binding but provisionally enforceable. In the present case, it cost the debtor EUR 15,000 in fines.
