Actually, the behaviors when you receive a warning under competition law are always the same. A summary can be found here.
- The warning should always be taken seriously. Send me the warning via my contact form without obligation and I will advise you on the next steps.
- Although you should not be put under pressure by short deadlines, you should still pay attention to them. In competition law, short deadlines are usually permissible and a violation can result in expensive injunctions.
- Do not sign the injunction attached to the warning without having checked it in advance. Even in the case of a legitimate warning, numerous traps and problems may lurk in the declaration of injunction. I can advise you at low cost and design a modified declaration of injunction.
- Never contact the reminder in advance, either by phone or email.
From time to time, however, there are also other possible defenses, but these depend very much on the specific circumstances, the interest of the warned party and, finally, also on things such as the sense of justice. Thus, there may well be situations in which a so-called negative declaratory action is appropriate, for example, in the case of allegedly incorrect copyright attribution of photos.
In the case of warnings from IGD Interessengemeinschaft Datenschutz e.V., such a procedure is also quite appropriate, because their active legitimacy as an interest group is already more than questionable. Of course, I don’t want to repeat what I said in my earlier article, but there is another reason for doing so at the moment. The IGD has probably reformulated its warnings into an information letter, as reported by Die Welt. I have not yet received such a letter, so I would be very interested in an anonymized version. The letter is probably connected with a rather aggressive request for a donation. Since the topic of a warning because of an unencrypted contact form is by no means, for example because of a change in the law, off the table, but rather a larger number of courts see a market conduct rule according to the UWG and thus a reason for a warning, such letters should not be ignored and certainly not, without a lawyer, be contacted with the IGD.
