1-star rating inadmissible?

A 1-star rating without text can also be inadmissible if contact did exist, but this had no apparent basis for the rating. This is how the Higher Regional Court (OLG) Cologne decided in a legal dispute between two competitors.

The background of the legal dispute was an event organised by an IT company at which a senior sales employee had participated. Four employees of anotherIT companywere listed as participants of the event. Only one employee had actually participated. In response to a corresponding request for anexplanation regarding stored data, the organiser granted access to the data. Shortly thereafter, the affected company discovered that a Google rating with one out of five stars had been published. The author was the senior employee of the event organiser. The rating was later deleted.

The affected company demanded cessation, disclosure as well as indemnification from the author for pre-legal attorney's fees. In first instance, the action was initially unsuccessful.

OLG Cologne: 1-star rating inadmissible

WithPartial judgement of 23.12.2022 – 6 U 83/22the OLG Cologne confirmed the claims of the affected company.

The author had put himself through the Google rating in a concrete competitive relationship with the affected company.

Since the rating was in connection with professional and also business activity, it did not serve solely for private expression of opinion. It was thus also a business action.

A rating through the award of one out of five stars in an Internet service is a disparaging value judgment. The statement was untrue in its factual core and sweepingly disparaging. Star ratings of business performance on Google profiles would not be understood by the relevant public as mereopinionsbut as personal evaluation of a service actually used. Insofar as such ratings contained a factual core to which the subjective evaluation attached. A sweeping disparagement which, due to the failure to communicate specific circumstances to which the disparaging statement relates, does not reveal this objective reference, amounts merely to disparagement and is therefore inadmissible unfair denigrating criticism.

The professional contact underlying the factual circumstances was no apparent basis for the rating, since in the present case it was not the services of the rated party that were evaluated, but circumstances that have nothing to do with the products of the rated party.

Conclusion

A – of whatever nature – contact is therefore not sufficient for a 1-star rating on Internet portals. Rather, it is required that a concrete service was used and subsequently evaluated. Otherwise, such a rating constitutes inadmissible denigrating criticism and this regardless of whether a concrete competitive relationship exists. This view has already been represented judicially on multiple occasions in the past and has in the meantime been confirmed also by the OLG Karlsruhe and the OLG Stuttgart.