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Zonie63 -> Court Rules That Yelp Must ID Negative Reviewers (1/9/2014 3:47:05 AM)
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This is kind of chilling.
quote:
In a ruling that could reshape the rules for online consumer reviews, a Virginia court has ruled that the popular website Yelp must turn over the names of seven reviewers who anonymously criticized a prominent local carpet cleaning business.
The case revolves around negative feedback against Virginia-based Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. The owner, Joe Hadeed, said the users leaving bad reviews were not real customers of the cleaning service — something that would violate Yelp’s terms of service. His attorneys issued a subpoena demanding the names of seven anonymous reviewers, and a judge in Alexandria ruled that Yelp had to comply.
The Virginia Court of Appeals agreed this week, ruling that the comments were not protected First Amendment opinions if the Yelp users were not customers and thus were making false claims.
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If “the reviewer was never a customer of the business, then the review is not an opinion; instead, the review is based on a false statement” and not subject to First Amendment protection, the opinion stated.
Mr. Hadeed said his company could not “match defendants’ reviews with actual customers in its database.”
Senior Judge James W. Haley Jr. stated in a separate opinion that agreed in part and dissented in part with the majority that Mr. Hadeed had not proved that the reviewers were not customers — he only suspected they were not.
“A business subject to critical commentary should not be permitted to force the disclosure of the identity of anonymous commentators simply by alleging that those commentators may not be customers because they cannot identify them in their database,” the judge said, adding that Mr. Hadeed’s complaints were likely a “self-serving argument.”
The Washington Post filed a friend of the court brief in support of Yelp, as did Gannett Co. Inc., the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the American Society of News Editors.
I generally take online reviews from sites like Yelp with a grain of salt anyway. I've even heard of a service which supposedly cleans up one's reputation on the internet and offers to get rid of bad reviews of businesses. I don't know how that works, nor does there appear to be a way to screen out good reviews of businesses which might be false. I've read about "click farms" where people are paid to click on "Like" for a targeted business's Facebook.
And how can someone know from an anonymous review whether they were customers or not? What if it turns out that these anonymous reviewers really were customers of this business? Would the court have to reverse its ruling? Would the plaintiff have to pay a penalty for bringing forth a false and frivolous lawsuit?
I always find it interesting how businesspeople always talk about how government should not interfere in the private sector and how capitalism is about "freedom," and yet, they go and pull something like this.
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