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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.
. 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.
According to the press coverage, yes, it explicitly invalidates such clauses. However, you should get legal advice from a lawyer, not from the internet.
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