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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"?
. 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.
Yelp is a glorified e-racketeer that collects extortion fees from small businesses the world over. Please spare me the "people being ale to speak their minds" BS.
if you can prove what they said was a lie then would still be actionable in court.
According to the press coverage, yes, it explicitly invalidates such clauses. However, you should get legal advice from a lawyer, not from the internet.
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.
It doesn't change libel or slander laws.
However, you should get legal advice from a lawyer, not from the internet.
You must be new. People get everything from the Internet now - dates, porn, news, fake news, etc...
Hell, people even try to get medical advice - on 4chan.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I would venture to guess that part of the "settlement" means it is a legally binding clause of the actual settlement, which is not an actual contract. In other words, he was compensated for his silence.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It has broad bi-partisan support, and basically passed both houses of congress and both major parties without any objections on a voice vote. The constitutionality is completely for the bill, i.e. freedom of speech. There is no way a challenge would go anywhere. IANAL.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
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.
You really should have used an automobile scenario - this is /.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
Allowing terms of service that prohibit disparagement does nothing to stop false reviews, because there was no service and no agreement to a contract in the first place. Libel laws are the only remedy against false reviews in either case.
But he didn't ask about whether it affects terms of a settlement, he asked if it affects a contract.
And asking the wrong question and getting an answer not actually related to his situation is why he should get legal advice from a lawyer, not from the internet.
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.
The law doesn't say you cannot be sued. The law makes certain contractual terms void.
The possibility still exists that you could be sued.
Your chance of victory may be higher and your cost of winning that suit might be lower than otherwise.