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French Blogger Fined For Negative Restaurant Review
An anonymous reader sends an article about another case in which a business who received a negative review online decided to retaliate with legal complaints. In August of last year, a French food blogger posted a review of an Italian restaurant called Il Giardino. The restaurant owners responded with legal threats based on the claim that they lost business from search results which included the review. The blogger deleted the post, but that wasn't enough. She was brought to court, and a fine of €1,500 ($2,040) was imposed. She also had to pay court costs, which added another €1,000 ($1,360). The blogger said, "Recently several writers in France were sentenced in similar proceedings for defamation, invasion of privacy, and so on. ... I don't see the point of criticism if it's only positive. It's clear that online, people are suspicious of places that only get positive reviews."
French here. The lady owner of the blog did not choose to lawyer up and went there to defend herself. The restaurant just wanted her to change the title of the blog post which was along the line of "The place to avoid at Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino" (where Cap-Ferret is the name of the town the restaurant is in). They just wanted the name of the restaurant removed from the title because it was 2nd place on Google and was starting to be detrimental to their business. She removed the blog post entirely on her own. It appears she doesn't intend to counter sue.
It pretty much looks like something that would not have happened if the defendant was properly represented.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I had RTFA. http://www.arretsurimages.net/breves/2014-07-08/Critique-de-restaurant-blogueuse-condamnee-id17677
Says she didn't take a lawyer (she didn't think she had the time to get them up to speed with what was going on) and won't appeal. A lawyer (maître Eolas) that does a lot of vulgarisation about french justice says that he doesn't know of another judgement against a noncommercial personal blog, and he thinks the problem might be that she didn't get a lawyer.
The actual review is on the webarchive. Reviewer and her mother used to go to that restaurant and have a good time. That time wasn't great, food came as the same time as apéritifs. Reads quite factual, and it is tagged as a piece of personal experience.
Full blown Barbara Streisand indeed. They apparently wanted the blog changed because the restaurant name in the title was putting the negative review high in the search results.
So instead, you google it now (il giardino lege cap ferret) and the first search results (at least from UK) are google+ reviews and yelp reviews (mostly 1 star, all since court verdict), and tripadvisor reviews, again with a low score due to whole pile of 1-stars added since the court verdict. Oh, and links to news of the court verdict.
Lawyer-up, load-up, point down, pull trigger.
Yep, people make snarky comments, but when I read stuff like this, it just places France lower and lower on my list of tourist destinations, and makes me prioritize other European countries where I've never heard of this crap happening, such as Germany and Denmark. It's not just this case with this restaurant; it seems I regularly see negative stuff in the press about France (remember the case of the Google Glass-wearing guy getting beaten by the staff at McDonald's in Paris? Or how about the big anti-gay protests? Or the recent news item about a bunch of Muslims attacking a French synagogue in response to Israeli activity in Gaza? Or the general problem of lots of poor and violent Muslims in French cities?), whereas I almost never hear anything bad about most other (northern/western) European nations.