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Businesses May No Longer Sue Customers Over Negative Reviews (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: A few months I wrote about the Consumer Review Fairness Act. In a nutshell, this offers legal protections to consumers who leave negative reviews on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. You can now call out the restaurant who gave you food poisoning, or a bed-bug infested hotel without the risk of being dragged into a civil court. The long-overdue bill explicitly bans non-disparagement clauses in contracts between businesses and patrons. Over the years, there's been a rash of people getting sued after speaking their mind online. Today, President Obama signed off on the Consumer Review Fairness Act. It's now law. As great as this is for consumers, it's even better for the likes of TripAdvisor and Yelp, whose business model relies on people being able to speak their minds.
Shouldn't Freedom of speech have a higher priority than a vague "we have the right to make money"?
This law means you cant sue under a contract theory. Suing under a libel theory is basically a loser action as getting into the "truth" of a matter is fact heavy, runs up crazy legal bills and amounts to a flip of a coin before a jury. Contract claims for breaching non-disparagement clauses are much more straight forward and often decided on motion with no need for a costly trial at all. Basically, very few people will file libel cases, but many more will happily file a contract claim if one is available.
Anyway, what this really means in practice is if you have a competitor with small pockets its will be even easier for you to pay some people to drown them in bad reviews and they realistically have no defense against it. It's anti-competitive and will help big business screw little business but its sufficiently populist on the surface that the prole masses will think it's a good thing.
If you post a bad review of a hotel to Facebook and use lots of foul language, Facebook can ban you because it's their platform; the hotel can't because it's not their platform. Post a bad review on the hotel's webpage and they can delete it and ban you because that's their platform. Neither of those are changing.
What is changing is that if you post a bad review to Facebook, the restaurant is not allowed to point to a clause in the contract you signed when renting the room that says you wouldn't say anything bad about them as a reason to sue you. They can still sue you, of course, but they would have to do it on the basis that your statement was false, not just that it was bad and you promised not to say anything bad.
Anyway, what this really means in practice is if you have a competitor with small pockets its will be even easier for you to pay some people to drown them in bad reviews and they realistically have no defense against it. It's anti-competitive and will help big business screw little business but its sufficiently populist on the surface that the prole masses will think it's a good thing.
They could do this anyway. If you haven't actually stayed at the hotel or whatever, then you are not covered by any potential contract forbidding bad reviews.
If the business is Twitter or Facebook, they can ban users for whatever obscure and selectively enforced rules they want. We can't appeal to free speech in those cases because they're both private businesses.
Correct. Twitter and Facebook have the right to regulate the content that passes through or is displayed by their network. If you find yourself banned from either (or both) you are not having your free speech impeded as you can still speak in other places - including public ones - so there is no free speech argument there.
But posting a negative review would seem to be free speech and should be protected over the wishes of the business involved.
Actually, this doesn't say that Yelp and others have to host the comment. If you post a bad Yelp review about ABCD company, and ABCD company sues Yelp instead of you, they could potentially pressure Yelp to drop the review.
This actually isn't a free speech issue, it is a consumer protection issue. It is supposed to allow customers to speak their minds without fear of retaliation. It doesn't mean that what the customer says has to be heard, though. The place where the review is posted can still be silenced in other ways.
So which is it?
Well, neither really. You can't appeal to "free speech" in either case.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.