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Appeals Court Clears Yelp of Extortion Claims
jfruh writes A U.S. appeals court cleared Yelp of charges of extortion related to its interaction with several small businesses who claim Yelp demanded that they pay for advertising or face negative reviews. While Yelp says it never altered a business rating for money, the court's finding was instead based on a strict reading of the U.S. extortion law, classifying Yelp's behavior as, at most, "hard bargaining." Interestingly, the EFF supported Yelp here, arguing that "Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves. In its amicus brief, EFF argued that mere conjecture about contributing content – like there was in this case – is not enough to allow a lawsuit to go forward."
Sure wouldn't want something to happen to it.... like no customers showing up again, ever!
"unless a person has a pre-existing right to be free of the threatened economic harm, threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion," appeals court judge Marsha Berzon wrote in the decision."
So apparently nobody has pre-existing right to be free of smear campaign on Yelp.
As much as I think Yelp are a bunch of abhuman bottom feeders who would do the world a favor if they caught fire, I am pleased by this one.
Section 230 is a vital defense against a truly hellish legal climate on the internet, and I'd hate to see it be chipped away during a fight against an unsympathetic defendant.
Yelp used to be my go-to app for restaurant reviews when in another city, but I find the quality of content on it has gone WAY downhill with things being very stale. While on a recent vacation, on THREE separate occasions Yelp sent me to a store that was closed, some of them for months.
Personally, I have switched to the Tripadvisor app, where I find the content is much more highly curated and the community is much more active.
Who could even trust a company that has no bad reviews? I find it impossible for any establishment to be universally liked, even if the sample group is only people who would both go to that business and post on Yelp.
Personally, the bad reviews are where I look to find out the worst parts of a product or business, and if their worst parts aren't really so bad then I'm more likely to buy.
I support a business who has been targeted by yelp, and it's not pleasant. I can't prove anything, but shortly after turning the abusive sales troll down, we started getting negative reviews. Look up the users making the reviews, and it seems they have a history of making negative reviews. What's more, most reviews were factually and demonstrably inaccurate. We couldn't find any of these users in our system, so we knew they weren't customers.
Now sure, they could have been normal trolls out to do what trolls do, but it just seemed too coincidental that they started popping up after we turned down a business relationship with yelp. Meanwhile, our customers' positive reviews would often never show up on yelp due to their algorithm.
The obvious solution to this entire headache is to dissuade family and friends from using yelp, spread the word far and wide that they are dishonest in their policies and that companies can pay for reviews. As "family IT", we have far more authority than yelp could ever hope for.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Not extortion, no siree!
The Mob is actually a benevolent society, concerned about the well being of local businesses.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
If Yelp has salespeople it's very easy to see that the salespeople have a motivation to punish businesses that don't play ball and they can do it without involving Yelp-the-company at all, by either doing it themselves or by farming it out if they worry about it getting linked back to them.
This seems to be one of those "plausible deniability" kind of rackets where the company has sales people who only get paid if they make sales and an official policy against doing something shady to obtain those sales, yet its well understood among the sales people that they should do X.
It also reminds me of the way Walmart exploits hourly workers -- the store manager is held to some financial goal. The corporation has a policy against making employees work off the clock, but it's a policy enforced at the store level by store managers. All Walmart has to do is squeeze the manager with financial targets he can only reach by ripping off employees.
My neighbor runs a small mom/pop type restaurant and he gets called about once a month by a yelp representative. He's got plenty of positive reviews on Yelp, but what they tell him is that if he pays yelp, they'll move the negative ones to the "not recommended reviews" list. Normally the only way to see this list is to scroll to the bottom and see a light grey link.
How is this any different from what the mafia did with it's "Pay for protection" schemes...?
If they don't change this, I'll give the US legal system a bad review
I say put the word out that Yelp reviews don't mean anything. Let them self-destruct.
Think again, only the government can infringe your "Human Rights", private individuals and companies cannot.
Rights are created by the government / the governed.
You could say (as I do) that morality transcends human institution, but the concept of a right as something transcendental makes no sense; rights are revoked by society in the case of a crime, so theyre clearly not absolute, and they dont really exist outside of a society (what meaning is a "right" to be free in the absence of a threat to that right?).
Do you want proactive insurance or reactive insurance? The mob sells the former. You pay to prevent something bad from happening. If you pay enough your competition might even leave town. There is the long term issue where the mob completely takes over your business. This reminds me of in the Godfather the Godfather says "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
Most people facing the pointy end of the stick already know about Yelp and its cousins, but the majority of the remainder don't, i.e. the sheep. The problem for businesses is for most business types the sheep don't have any good information sources, and even if they know about Yelp's flaws, see the bad choices as better than nothing. After all, some, maybe even all, of the reviews are real, right?
You can root concept of morality in religion as many people do. Then you have your transcendence and existence outside of society.
Rights are negotiated. Sometimes settled by force on the battlefield. Sometimes through pressure such as protests or boycotts. Sometimes lobbied for by corporate trade associations. Often they are set in place in order to win support for another cause. But fact remains unless somebody fought for it, it is not a right. You can claim any right you choose, but be prepared to fight for it if the powers that be don't recognize your claim.
Sure they can. What is murder but an infringement of one's right to life by a private individual?
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Rights are created by the government / the governed.
You could say (as I do) that morality transcends human institution, but the concept of a right as something transcendental makes no sense; rights are revoked by society in the case of a crime, so theyre clearly not absolute, and they dont really exist outside of a society (what meaning is a "right" to be free in the absence of a threat to that right?).
The legal philosophy in the USA is laid out in the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable human rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This isn't a statement about religious faith; rather that rights are inherent in the human person and not granted by any civil authority (it is a statement of belief, since you can't prove it). It's the duty of society to recognize the rights of all men and the job of government to protect them. Obviously they wouldn't matter much to one living in total isolation who never encounters another person, but that's not really a common scenario.
The downside to this model is that it doesn't create an easy way to resolve what is or is not a right, which has been the cause of much strife since the founding. Like Sentrion says, anyone can claim a right, but you have to fight for recognition. And not all claims are necessarily valid.
In practical terms, the government effectively grants rights, since we've conceptually moved from the attitude "the Constitution doesn't say the government can do that" to "the Constitution doesn't say you can do that", thus effectively limiting our freedoms to those spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
As for criminals, we curtail their freedom because they've violated the social contract by not respecting the rights of others or as a form of group self-defense, but we do still acknowledge that they have rights. For example, prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment are based on the concept of their right to justice.
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A friend of mine used to work at Yelp When he did, I asked him about this. (Accusations of cooked yelp reviews are far from a recent development.) For whatever itâ(TM)s worth⦠but I have no reason to suspect he was lying to me⦠he told me that sales and operations absolutely ARE firewalled from each other, that by no means do the sales types have the necessary administrative or database access to adjust a business' ratings, and that theyâ(TM)re not the sharpest tools in the shed anyway and probably wouldnâ(TM)t understand how to use said access if they had it.
He also told me, though, that their sales department was one of the slimiest bunch of lying scumbags heâ(TM)d ever encountered; and he wouldnâ(TM)t doubt for a moment that they were TELLING businesses that they could have their ratings adjusted if they bought ads.
Imagine all the people...
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves.
Should that protection apply if Yelp charges to remove negative reviews? At that point, it the site still user-generated content? Suppose there were 1000 anonymous monkeys adding negative reviews of Slashdot, and positive reviews of Slashdot. Then Yelp charges Slashdot to remove the negative reviews. Can Yelp still claim that the site is nothing but user generated content? That's a slippery slope...
Imagine that Yelp merely took the sentences from people's reviews, and charged to remove the negative sentences. Can they claim protection then? What if they selectively removed letters and rearranged the words to form different reviews? Is that user generated content? It seems to me that they crossed the line by charging to remove reviews, and they should not be protected.
Yelp would still have won today, since the basis was that there was no evidence against them, only suspicion.
The legal philosophy in the USA is laid out in the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable human rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
--Robert A. Heinlein
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Pretty sure GP meant "lawfully infringe". Execution and murder are essentially the same but for legal trappings.
You can root concept of morality in religion as many people do.
I do, but rights are not the same thing as morality, and are a concept that requires the existence of a government.
What sense would a "right to free speech" make in an anarchic society, for example?
The legal philosophy in the USA is laid out in the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable human rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
--Robert A. Heinlein
I love Robert Heinlein, but that quote makes it look like he either doesn't understand the concept of human rights, or he's deliberately obfuscating the topic. I'll have to assume the latter.
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The legal philosophy in the USA is laid out in the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable human rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
--Robert A. Heinlein
I love Robert Heinlein, but that quote makes it look like he either doesn't understand the concept of human rights, or he's deliberately obfuscating the topic. I'll have to assume the latter.
Check out the context for yourself. The quote is from Starship Troopers.
It's not that Heinlein doesn't understand or is deliberately obfuscating, he's simply using a perspective different from your own, IMHO. The way I interpret Heinlein here is that rhetoric and flowery prose doesn't *give* us freedom, and that freedom is something that needs to be fought for, to get, and to retain. Read (or re-read) the novel -- I think you might learn something.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Check out the context for yourself. The quote is from Starship Troopers.
It's not that Heinlein doesn't understand or is deliberately obfuscating, he's simply using a perspective different from your own, IMHO. The way I interpret Heinlein here is that rhetoric and flowery prose doesn't *give* us freedom, and that freedom is something that needs to be fought for, to get, and to retain. Read (or re-read) the novel -- I think you might learn something.
I read it during my formative years, and it was influential in the shaping of my political views; but that was so long ago I couldn't tell you what it said or what I liked about it (the politics part - what's not to like about powered armor?). In the given context, it's not a different perspective from my own - it's what I was saying here and elsewhere: that simply recognizing rights doesn't secure them. Out of context, that quote sounds like Heinlein doesn't even believe in the concept of rights inherent to a person, or that it's irrelevant.
What the Declaration states, and what I believe as well, is that these rights are real and exist; whether respected, trodden upon, forgotten, or codified into law; and the moral corollary that everyone has a duty to respect the rights of others; disagreeing with the assertion that rights are arbitrary, not transcendental, and can be revoked by a society. Ultimately it's a philosophical question: what's a "right", how do we get them, and how do they relate to morality in the context of society?
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