Disputes over misleading advertising in Georgia are resolved under the Advertising Law. That law contains no separate article headed misleading advertising: the attack on misleadingness proceeds through the general requirements of comprehensibility and fair comparison and the concept of improper advertising, and the outcome lies in counter-advertising, the allocation of responsibility and a court claim. This page explains that route on the basis of articles four, twelve-one, nineteen, twenty and twenty-one of the law.
The Baseline Requirement of Comprehensibility
Under article four, advertising must be understandable at the moment of its presentation, without special knowledge or technical means, as advertising directly. This is the starting rule for any dispute: if a consumer cannot recognize or read the message in the form in which it is arranged, the matter becomes one of breach of the law's requirements by the advertisement. In addition, advertising is distributed throughout Georgia in the state language, and a breach of the language rules may likewise ground a dispute.
The Limits of Comparative Advertising
Misleading messages live most often in comparative advertising. The relevant norm permits comparison only where it compares goods or services used for the same need or purpose; objectively compares one or more objective, essential, verifiable and typical characteristics, which may include price; does not cause confusion between the customer and the competitor or their marks; does not discredit the competitor, its marks, goods, services or activity; and does not take advantage of the reputation of the competitor's trade mark.
Additional conditions apply: where products with an indication of origin are advertised, the comparison must in each case refer to products of the same designation, and a comparison must not be a reproduction of goods whose trade mark and name are protected. A comparison that breaks these conditions — for instance an unverifiable or unstated claim of superiority — is precisely the form treated as misleading and falls under the concept of improper advertising.
Counter-Advertising
Article nineteen defines the remedy: counter-advertising must be distributed through the same means and with the same characteristics of sequence, space and place as the improper advertising. This means that a reduced or buried retraction of a misleading statement is not enough — the correction must carry the same visibility the violation itself had.