UK High Court: Uber Is Lawful (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The UK's High Court has been hearing a case brought against ridesharing service Uber by Transport for London, the government body in charge of public transport in London. Their claim was that Uber drivers' smartphones should be considered meters because they use GPS and data from external servers to calculate the cost of a ride. Meters are banned in private hire vehicles (and TfL's claims were backed by associations for local taxi drivers and private hire cars). The High Court has found that Uber does not run afoul of that ban. Justice Ouseley said the technology was fundamentally different from standard taxi meters. Transport for London welcomed the decision, but transportation lobbyists are likely to continue challenging Uber in court whenever they can.

Comments

However

[squiggleslash]

The Justices were relying upon Uber's patent, which clearly said the technology was new because it included the words "...but on the Internet" at the end.

Re:However

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If your reaction to this story is, "Rats! We need a different way to stop them then!" then you have a problem.

One should merely ask do they meet reasonable safety and insurance concerns? and move on with life. Regulatory capture by entrenched interests is in nobody's interest, and the fact these services are so popular just emphasizes how a nominal democracy can stray from the actual wishes of the people without a loud drumbeat to watch and interfere with the scurrilous, behind the scenes crap.

Re:However

[squiggleslash]

I'm making a joke about patents. I'm not commenting on whether Uber's in the right or not.

Although...

Regulatory capture, for the most part, is a myth. I've seen very few cases of regulation where somehow the regulated benefit competitively. Friedman's poster child for "Regulatory capture" was the railroads, and he was writing this nonsense back in the 1950s, long after it became clear over-regulation (and government subsidized competition) was utterly destroying the railroad industry, so it's hard to take seriously as a complaint.

Taxis aren't regulated because of a conspiracy of taxi companies to prevent competition. They're regulated because virtually every city in the world that has them wants to make sure customers aren't abused, and taxi companies go along with it only because a common minimum standard of behavior means more trust from potential customers.

And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis and point out that New York is regulating the market to prevent it from becoming an anti-social streets-clogging menace. Medallions, and equivalents, aren't really used in cities that don't have problems with too many vehicles on the roads.

Uber in London? No idea. They may even be in the right there, assuming their drivers are not stopping when hailed from the streets. Uber strikes me as fitting right in with the minicab model.

Re:However

[Roblimo]

Right. Minicabs with automated dispatch. That's what Uber is.

We need to stop calling it a "ridesharing" service, though. It's an automated dispatch company. Uber and Lyft are starting to experiment with true ridesharing, but I have trouble believing it will work except as a separate brand, likely with vans.

Better Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

A better headline would be:
There is a law involving cabs that Uber isn't breaking.

They did not declare Uber legal. They just declared that smartphones aren't taxi meters.

Anticipated trip cost

[Firethorn]

The Uber cellphone could certainly act sort of like a standard taxi meter, calculating total distance traveled during a trip, but instead it does the equivalent of calling up a central office and having somebody determine from a map an estimated driving time and distance to plug into a formula to determine the appropriate charge. The passenger knows the total cost of the trip when they book it. It's a lot like some transport companies - 'trip from hotel X to the airport? $30'.

Remember, terminologies vary by country and even city. In NYC, Uber is mostly a 'black car' service, just more responsive. They do not qualify as taxis, and they deliberately take actions to avoid being called taxis, at least in NYC.

Nobody here has done it yet, but I have seen posters ripping Uber for not doing x or y, like having meters, saying not having them makes them not taxis, then saying that they should be following the taxi rules...

Dumbest technicality *ever*.

[pla]

Personally, I 100% support Uber because I firmly believe that if I want to hitch a ride with a complete stranger (whether for pay or just hitchhiking), I should have every right to do so.

That said, Uber won this for a completely ridiculous reason. Whether or not a GPS counts as a "meter"? Seriously??? Why the hell do politicians insist on making laws-by-proxy, instead of just addressing what they really mean?

Hey, what do I know? Why just say "Taxis require a special license", when you could instead ban private ownership of some obscure bit of hardware largely peripheral to the core task at hand?

Re:Dumbest technicality *ever*.

[jonbryce]

The laws in London say that taxis must be equipped with a meter, and mini-cabs must not be equipped with a meter. Because Über's meter is in the clouds and not in the car, the car is not equipped with a meter, and therefore it complies with the rules.

Re: Of course it's lawful!

[AK Marc]

If you take the self-named terms as reality, then the best country on the planet is North Korea. It's a Democratic People's Republic, says so right in the name.

The fascist dictatorship calling itself "socialist" wasn't.

Judgement said no such thing

[whoever57]

The judgement did not say that Uber is lawful.

It only said that Uber does not violate the law against minicabs using taxi meters to determine charges. There are other lawsuits pending.

Re:Judgement said no such thing

[Chris Johnson]

Well, I figured it was just another Uber-written article so I know better to take it at face value.

It's hilariously brazen at times. What gets me is why they consider Slashdot such fertile ground. Probably only because nowhere else can these guys get this kind of propaganda density, and because they're clearly targeting angry nerds. Traditionally, oil companies et al try to buy off graduate students and scientists, but this isn't a question of science, it's a question of social expectations and the way societies are structured.

And clearly Slashdotters are thought leaders and capable of swaying lots of regular people with cheeto-encrusted rants :D way of the future!

Re:Ridesharing?

[david_thornley]

The definition of "ridesharing" typically involves a driver going somewhere for his or her own purposes and carrying a passenger from where the driver starts to where the driver is going, or more or less around the path the driver takes.

If a driver is summoned to a particular place and transports someone to somewhere the driver would not have gone, that isn't ridesharing.

Lawful good

[thinkwaitfast]

or lawful evil?