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It Will Soon Be Illegal To Punish Customers Who Criticize Businesses Online (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Congress has passed a law protecting the right of U.S. consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from companies. The bipartisan Consumer Review Fairness Act was passed by unanimous consent in the U.S. Senate yesterday, a Senate Commerce Committee announcement said. The bill, introduced in 2014, was already approved by the House of Representatives and now awaits President Obama's signature. The Consumer Review Fairness Act -- full text available here -- voids any provision in a form contract that prohibits or restricts customers from posting reviews about the goods, services, or conduct of the company providing the product or service. It also voids provisions that impose penalties or fees on customers for posting online reviews as well as those that require customers to give up the intellectual property rights related to such reviews. The legislation empowers the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the new law and impose penalties when necessary. The bill also protects reviews that aren't available via the Internet.
That law went into effect on December 15, 1791, along with 9 other good ones.
And those 10 have been getting chipped away at, with increasing frequency. As Snowden remarked today, "the FBI is now openly issuing the general warrants that, in 1760, led John Adams to first dream of independence."
Reading between the lines, defamation law still applies. It is only extra clauses in the sales contract banning/punishing bad reviews which are now not allowed.
If I write that I bought a new Rolls Royce, but when it arrived it was made of cardboard, and when I sat in it it collapsed and then caught fire, I can still be sued for libel, and if RR can show I was lying, I'll lose. Conversely if RR habitually sues people who post honest opinions which criticize them, then they're open to a SLAPP countersuit. This looks like a good balance to me.
Note, I am not a lawyer, and have no information beyond reading TFA. Corrections and elaborations from actual lawyers are welcome.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
And those 10 have been getting chipped away at, with increasing frequency. As Snowden remarked today, "the FBI is now openly issuing the general warrants that, in 1760, led John Adams to first dream of independence."
Really? Seems to me that their scope has been improved in a really big way. Namely, they all originally only applied at the federal level. Your state at the time was still able to have an official religion, was allowed to censor speech, you had no right to privacy, protection from warrant-less searches and seizures, and basically everything else.