Update: Lawsuit against Plattform Lyoness

Recently, this Blog has reported that Lyoness had filed suit against Plattform Lyoness, accusing the founders of the Plattform of violating secrecy agreements and publishing sensitive information, only intended for internal use (i.e. only intended for the eyes of members and directors). Today, Plattform Lyoness has published the preliminary order issued by the court in this case, which states that the charges filed by Lyoness are hugely unfounded, and therefore denied, yet one complaint is preliminarily honoured by the court, which means that Plattform Lyoness can no longer operate their website on the domain 'plattform-lyoness.at', as the court feels that this name does not clearly distinguish the website from Lyoness, and could give readers the impression that it is a website run by Lyoness itself.

In general, the court has preliminarily ruled that people should not use Lyoness in their domain name, if they do not at the same time incorporate a distinctive term to classify the content of the website and to indicate that the website has a negative attitude towards Lyoness. Therefore, the founders of Plattform Lyoness have now registered the domain http://www.plattform-lyoness-geschaedigte.at, and has turned its original domain into a 'tunnel website', which gives its readers a choice to be redirected to the official corporate website of Lyoness, or the new domain of Plattform Lyoness.

This is the very helpful explanation of another (German-speaking) Lyoness watcher:

"Hubert Freidl and Lyoness tried (via an Austrian court) to forbid generally everyone, and especially the persons who run the "Plattform" the use of the word "Lyoness" in any kind of domain(-name). And of course, Freidl and Lyoness wanted the court, to shut down the existing website. 

The court generally declined to do so. But it has set up some terms, on the use of the [trademark] name 
Lyoness in domains/URLs. If the word "Lyoness" is part of a domain-name, the domain-name ITSELF has to tell clearly that the website is not run by Lyoness, or that this is a website that reports about Lyoness in an objective/critical way."

In its preliminary ruling, the court has decided that it is Lyoness that should cover all the legal costs for the proceedings that took place. 33.3% will always remain costs that Lyoness should cover; the other 66.7% is so far the responsibility of Lyoness too, yet that could still change in the unlikely event that the court would come to a different final verdict, with a differing content from this preliminary ruling.

"To understand [the distribution of] the costs, that have been mentioned, you have to understand first 
that the "verdict" is not really a verdict, technically. 

The direct translation from (Austrian law) German would be: "interim order". This is an 
order that any court can give, long before it reaches a verdict, just to prevent that further 
damage is done to one of the parties in the lawsuit, as long as the lawsuit goes on (as you may know, 
lawsuits can last for quite a long time, even years...). 

Those interim orders are not really verdicts, but in 90% of all cases, verdicts will sound quite 
the same in the end, as interim orders do. 

In this "interim order", the court decided that Lyoness has to pay 33,3% of the court fees anyway, and 
that Lyoness has to pay the remaining 66,6% for now, until the court reaches a final verdict. So you can be quite sure, that Lyoness will have to pay all of the court fees in the end..."

The Complaint Centre sincerely thanks the regular contributors over at the Verbraucherrunde forum for their help translating and explaining the preliminary court order, and wishes to compliment them on the excellent hard work they have been putting in to find and spread the truth about Lyoness for many years now.