13 ms·

A little SF personal injury case threatens 'most important law' on the Internet

106 points by doctorshady 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago
Clickbait title.
gcb0 10y ago
B.S. this is orders of magnitude less significant than big studios removing random youtube videos from the air, accusing them of copyright infringement, even ones that have no background music, just because it says bad things about something the studio worked on.
- twblalock 10y ago
  Actually, this is far more significant than YouTube videos being taken down. If Yelp loses, this case could make it possible for pretty much any site that accepts user comments, including YouTube, social networks like Facebook, review sites, advertising sites like Craiglist, and even personal blogs with comment sections, to be held accountable for what users post. That could lead to a significant amount of prior restraint which would have the effect of restricting online speech in places where it is most useful. That would be much further-reaching than anything YouTube does.
  - kjksf 10y ago
    Where did you get that from? The article says that Yelp has been ordered by a judge to remove a few posts that have been found libelous. Yelp is refusing. Nowhere does it say that Yelp was "held accountable" for anything. It's also not a case of prior restraint since it happened after a trial and a verdict. The sky is not falling.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      I didn't say this was prior restraint. I said it could lead to prior restraint. So does the article, and so does common sense -- if companies can be hauled into court whenever someone posts libel on their sites, they will take steps to prevent such libel from being posted in the first place, e.g. by proactively moderating and filtering negative reviews. The article explicitly addresses this possibility.
      - cft 10y ago
        Perhaps you should read the article to the end before commenting: "Glassdoor.com, which posts anonymous employee comments about companies to inform job-seekers about working conditions, says the ruling began to show up in letters demanding the removal of comments and disclosure of users’ identities almost immediately after it was handed down."
        twblalock 10y ago
        This supports my point that sites can be held accountable for users' posts. It certainly does not undermine my point in any way. And I did read the entire article, and I understood it, thank you very much. You should apologize for suggesting that I did not. EDIT: nevermind, the response was in the wrong part of the thread.
        cft 10y ago
        Oops sorry. I commented at the wrong level: this was meant to be a response to kjksf above in the thread, trying to support your point...
        twblalock 10y ago
        In that case, I apologize to you.
        sharemywin 10y ago
        No problem you can just sue and get the judge compel HN to publish the apology.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
      > The article says that Yelp has been ordered by a judge to remove a few posts that have been found libelous. Yelp is refusing. Yelp was not a party to the case. > It's also not a case of prior restraint since it happened after a trial and a verdict. Yelp was ordered to do something, but Yelp did not receive any opportunity for a trial.
      - lsaferite 10y ago
        Yelp benefits from the safe harbour provisions by not being the originator of the comments. Being legally ordered to remove a comment in no way threatens that provision.
        JoshTriplett 10y ago
        A trial to which they're not a named party still shouldn't be able to issue them such a court order.
        nkurz 10y ago
        You seem to have thought more about these issues than I have. I don't see why it should matter if Yelp is a named party. Is it because this is civil and not criminal? Let me try a few parallels, and perhaps you can point out the flaws. Someone posts my original work to Youtube. I sue the individual, and the court agrees that posting was illegal and orders the plaintiff to remove it. The plaintiff says that they no longer have the password. The court sends an order to Youtube saying that the should take it down. Now, there's a special procedure for this under the DMCA if the claim is copyright infringement, but are you saying that Youtube should be able to ignore the court order? An identity thief applies for credit cards in my name. They are convicted, and the court orders the bank to cancel the credit card account that was fraudulently obtained. The bank is not a named party. Would you say that the bank should keep account until I sue them separately? A children's toy is badly constructed and dangerous. The manufacturer is sued by an aggrieved parent. A court makes an award to the parent, and orders that sales of the toy be halted. All resellers receive a court order telling them to stop selling the product. Should they comply? I'm not seeing the hazard in having companies obey court orders even if they are not named parties. Presumably there is a process where they can refuse and get a court hearing about the validity of the order? Or is the issue that there is no such process? Edit: I'm reading Volokh's amicus now (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3038335/Hassell-v-Bird-Internet-Law-Scholars-Letter-1.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3038335/Hassell-v...), which makes it clearer that the distinction is something like "because speech is different". I don't really understand his argument, though, or why he keeps using "allegedly libelous" to describe something a court has found to be libelous. I think it's because he's arguing that the collection of comments (or reviews) published by Yelp is contextually different than the individual comment, and that one may be libelous and the other not. While there is some truth to this, I think there is a difference between a conscious compilation, and a "bulletin board" type system where posters can add whatever they wish without review.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    the court was not holding yelp accountable, they asked yelp to remove a post that a jury found to be criminal. YouTube silences you without a court order or anything.
- runholm 10y ago
  What you are describing is a problem that exists only in the domain of Googles DMCA handling policies. The Yelp issue is in the domain of US law.
eeZi 10y ago
We don't have section 230 in Europe yet the sky isn't falling.
- twblalock 10y ago
  You don't have a vibrant tech sector either.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- guelo 10y ago
  Yea, all the giant European social media companies are doing fine. Oh wait, they don't exist. I wonder why.
  - eeZi 10y ago
    US companies like Facebook are doing business in Europe and have users in Europe, so they're subject to EU law.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      That could change. At some point, the cost of complying with EU regulation might be greater than the cost of shutting down the EU subsidiaries, and Facebook could do that, host all content in the US, and be subject to US law only. Would the EU block Facebook as a response? I doubt that will be a popular move.
      - eeZi 10y ago
        Neither of these are going to happen. Closing the EU subsidiary would be a PR disaster, especially after the recent lawsuit (Max Schrems vs. Facebook). While the EU obviously wouldn't block access to Facebook, I doubt that the cost of complying with regulation would be larger than shutting down their subsidiary. Think ad revenue, declining user base due to bad PR, and I don't think this move would go over well with their investors.
lambdasquirrel 10y ago
So, what if sites only have to remove the content if it's been ruled as defamatory? If it's some dumb little thing like an immature comment on a Youtube video, no big deal. If it's something injurious like a bad review on something that matters, then yeah, should be taken down. Am I missing something here?
- twblalock 10y ago
  The courts might make an exception for defamatory or libelous content, or they might undermine section 230 to the extent that it no longer works well, or they might reject it entirely. If section 230 is struck down, the consequences will not be limited to defamatory or libelous content.
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > If section 230 is struck down to be clear here: a federal law cannot be struck down by a state court.
vinhboy 10y ago
I don't know why most of the comments on here, so far, are so nonchalant about this. > Hassell sued Bird for libel and won a judgment for more than $550,000 in damages and costs, as well as an injunction ordering Bird to remove the ostensibly defamatory material from Yelp This is fucking nuts. How can someone be sued for $550K for writing a bad yelp review. Can someone please explain why the law allows for ridiculous damages like this. If this is allowed, I would wipe my online identity and live in Tor permanently.
- ap22213 10y ago
  I think this probably happens much more frequently than people may realize. I once gave a doctor a bad Yelp review and was very careful to avoid stating anything that could be claimed as libel - I only stated very specific and accurate facts and my opinions of them. They still seemed to try to come after me for libel (but quickly gave up). Interestingly, I had even used a throwaway email address and Yelp account. But, they still tracked me down. I'm guessing that maybe they had Yelp pull the server logs, but I don't really know. My Yelp review was then hidden. And, the Doctor responded directly to my review, calling me out by name and essentially calling me a liar (I wasn't). I certainly didn't want to get messed up with a legal case, so I ignored it. However, it was a very startling experience.
  - pstrateman 10y ago
    > the Doctor responded directly to my review, calling me out by name and essentially calling me a liar (I wasn't) That seems likely it would violate HIPAA in some way...
    - icantdrive55 10y ago
      We have a plastic surgeon, in in my county, that pissed off a lot of patients. She must have over 50 negative reviews. Well she sued most of them. I think the lawyer sued 45 of them. The judge ruled against all the lawsuits. All thrown out of court. Now, the physician resorts to describing what was physically wrong with the patient online in a rebuttal. For instance, "Susan--you seemed happy when we removed those ugly brown spots I removed?" I've been suprised she hasen't been accused of voilating HIPPA either. I don't use Yelp. I honestly try to stay away from most doctors--just don't like most of them. Out of all the professions, MD's seem to dislike Yelp the most. Gone are the days where they can treat patients like dirt, and the patient has no recourse--other than dying. It's too bad that physicians are so arrogant. I don't get it. The last twenty years have exposed the profession to be so much of an art? (I do try to recognize the Doctor who is taking on hard cases, and give that Doctor a large benefit of the doubt. For instance, the medi-cal Doctor gets a get out of jail free card, but most of the negative reviews are for the doctors who are charging $350.00 hr, in good areas of the county?)
morecoffee 10y ago
Can Yelp have it both ways? It seems Bird was ordered to remove the comment, but Hassel couldn't prove she made them. Yelp would either have to say that Bird made the comments, and absolve themselves of responsibility, or instead become responsible. Otherwise it would seem that any anonymous comment could be used to skip libel penalties. Surely there has to be precedent for this in the past few years.
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tomohawk 10y ago
Since sites like facebook seem to be taking more of an active role in censoring/curating comments and content, it seems like this exemption would no longer apply to them at some point.
- makomk 10y ago
  As the law currently stands, no. You can take an active role in curating comments and still be protected. You can even build a business model around charging people to remove defamatory information about them from your site, and Section 230 not only protects you from liability, it protects your business model by preventing the courts from forcing you to remove that content. A number of companies such as RipoffReport.com have built up very successful businesses around this model, and it's that which is endangered by this lawsuit.
  - pif 10y ago
    > it protects your business model by preventing the courts from forcing you to remove that content. Well, than Section 230 is simply wrong. It's important not to hold Yelp responsible for what a user wrote on his forum, but I fail to see how it can be damaging for a site to delete some unlawful-ruled content (which it didn't create), apart from the immoral case you named.
    - morgante 10y ago
      The problem with that is that's putting Yelp into the position of censoring content. If the court thinks that a review is defamatory, they should just order the reviewer to take it down. No need to involve Yelp at all.
      - lsaferite 10y ago
        You say that like Yelp doesn't already self-censor to suit it's business needs.
        10y ago
keithpeter 10y ago
One wonders if Ava Bird is actually OK. Do people often drop off the grid like that and fail to respond to court papers &c? UK: I suspect the legal situation is a bit more complex here (it usually is), so perhaps the title should be 'most important law in the US'?
- buro9 10y ago
  > UK: I suspect the legal situation is a bit more complex here (it usually is), so perhaps the title should be 'most important law in the US'? reply It's simpler in the UK and EU at the moment. You want to look at the EU e-commerce directive, paragraph 43 and the definition of "mere conduit" in the appendix: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32000L0031&from=EN http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE... In essence, (and directly from the law): "Mere conduit" 1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider: (a) does not initiate the transmission; (b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and (c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.
  - confounded 10y ago
    So, algorithmic curation completely changes classification. (Seems like a sensible law.)
  - keithpeter 10y ago
    Excellent! Thanks for the specific reference
- morgante 10y ago
  > Do people often drop off the grid like that and fail to respond to court papers &c? Yes, all the time.
OliverJones 10y ago
Working for a nonprofit, I once was ripped off by a service provider. I posted a Yelp review describing the facts of the case and saying "would-be customers, be careful." This service provider retaliated by posting false and malicious statements about my character. Lucky we had a pro-bono lawyer, or this would have cost me thousands. As it is, it did cost the nonprofit thousands (in the ripoff). We wasted time too. (Hint: it's really hard to collect after you get a favorable judgement in small claims court. Small claims court is a waste of time unless you're making a claim against a deep-pocketed multinational corporation.) This experience taught me that Yelp is useless for anything except five-star reviews. The personal risk of using Yelp to tell the truth about bad service is simply too high.
- ensignavenger 10y ago
  It may depend on your jurisdiction, but I don't think in most jurisdictions it is any harder to collect a judgment from small clams court than it is any other judgment... but I know from personal experience how hard it can be to collect a judgment! (Though in my case, after a lot of perseverance, time and money, I was able to finally collect- and even if it wasn't worth the time, I would probably do it over again, for the experience and for the fact that I believe it will help keep the same person from ripping off someone else in the future- someone else that may not be able to fight back.
the_duke 10y ago
Please add "US" in the title. The world has more than one legal system.
- jasongill 10y ago
  I'd say it's pretty well established that SF means San Francisco, which is most definitely in the US.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    I'm in the US, and I always read it as one of Science Fiction, Sugar Free, Semper Fi, Source Forge or even Stupidity Factor before I have to stop and think about what else it might mean. Not everyone on planet Earth uses California as the zero point in their mental coordinate system.
SeanDav 10y ago
> "Because of the immunity it grants to publishers who act as intermediaries for this flow of information and commentary, “Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet,” says Thomas Burke" If Yelp was a pure intermediary, perhaps they would have a case, but they are not and neither are any of the other companies mentioned. All these companies decide what they want to keep on their sites and what they want to remove. All of them can and do delete information and block accounts of people that break their rules. They should not be able to hide behind Section 230 by keeping information on their site that they know to be libellous or illegal and they should be prosecuted for doing so.
- zaroth 10y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you mean by "pure intermediary". Section 230 does not say that you have to publish all user-generated content indiscriminately in order for its safe-harbor to apply. IANAL, but that's not how I understand that Section 230 works. If it did work that way, I think the law would be horribly broken. No site hosting UGC can be completely un-moderated, and therefore by your reasoning, no site with UGC content could benefit from Section 230. Luckily, sites can exercise some measure of editorial control of their UGC while at the same time still benefiting from Section 230 protections. As the OP states, the law is often regarded as the legal backbone of the internet, and its protections for publishers should not be easily dismissed. What Yelp is demanding here is to be a named defendant if they are to be bound by the court decision, which is already the standard for newspapers. I think it's fair to expect to have a seat at the table if the courts are going to be ordering you to modify your site. Particularly because in this case there appear to be questions-of-fact regarding which reviews were even written by the defendant.
bcg1 10y ago
Couldn't Yelp just leave the comment up but add a message to note that it has ruled as defamation by the court? Maybe the court should structure its order like that, so that no content has to be removed but the plaintiff can get some relief.

106 points by doctorshady 10y ago

Clickbait title.

gcb0 10y ago

B.S. this is orders of magnitude less significant than big studios removing random youtube videos from the air, accusing them of copyright infringement, even ones that have no background music, just because it says bad things about something the studio worked on.

twblalock 10y ago
Actually, this is far more significant than YouTube videos being taken down. If Yelp loses, this case could make it possible for pretty much any site that accepts user comments, including YouTube, social networks like Facebook, review sites, advertising sites like Craiglist, and even personal blogs with comment sections, to be held accountable for what users post. That could lead to a significant amount of prior restraint which would have the effect of restricting online speech in places where it is most useful. That would be much further-reaching than anything YouTube does.
- kjksf 10y ago
  Where did you get that from? The article says that Yelp has been ordered by a judge to remove a few posts that have been found libelous. Yelp is refusing. Nowhere does it say that Yelp was "held accountable" for anything. It's also not a case of prior restraint since it happened after a trial and a verdict. The sky is not falling.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    I didn't say this was prior restraint. I said it could lead to prior restraint. So does the article, and so does common sense -- if companies can be hauled into court whenever someone posts libel on their sites, they will take steps to prevent such libel from being posted in the first place, e.g. by proactively moderating and filtering negative reviews. The article explicitly addresses this possibility.
    - cft 10y ago
      Perhaps you should read the article to the end before commenting: "Glassdoor.com, which posts anonymous employee comments about companies to inform job-seekers about working conditions, says the ruling began to show up in letters demanding the removal of comments and disclosure of users’ identities almost immediately after it was handed down."
      - twblalock 10y ago
        This supports my point that sites can be held accountable for users' posts. It certainly does not undermine my point in any way. And I did read the entire article, and I understood it, thank you very much. You should apologize for suggesting that I did not. EDIT: nevermind, the response was in the wrong part of the thread.
        cft 10y ago
        Oops sorry. I commented at the wrong level: this was meant to be a response to kjksf above in the thread, trying to support your point...
        twblalock 10y ago
        In that case, I apologize to you.
        sharemywin 10y ago
        No problem you can just sue and get the judge compel HN to publish the apology.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    > The article says that Yelp has been ordered by a judge to remove a few posts that have been found libelous. Yelp is refusing. Yelp was not a party to the case. > It's also not a case of prior restraint since it happened after a trial and a verdict. Yelp was ordered to do something, but Yelp did not receive any opportunity for a trial.
    - lsaferite 10y ago
      Yelp benefits from the safe harbour provisions by not being the originator of the comments. Being legally ordered to remove a comment in no way threatens that provision.
      - JoshTriplett 10y ago
        A trial to which they're not a named party still shouldn't be able to issue them such a court order.
        nkurz 10y ago
        You seem to have thought more about these issues than I have. I don't see why it should matter if Yelp is a named party. Is it because this is civil and not criminal? Let me try a few parallels, and perhaps you can point out the flaws. Someone posts my original work to Youtube. I sue the individual, and the court agrees that posting was illegal and orders the plaintiff to remove it. The plaintiff says that they no longer have the password. The court sends an order to Youtube saying that the should take it down. Now, there's a special procedure for this under the DMCA if the claim is copyright infringement, but are you saying that Youtube should be able to ignore the court order? An identity thief applies for credit cards in my name. They are convicted, and the court orders the bank to cancel the credit card account that was fraudulently obtained. The bank is not a named party. Would you say that the bank should keep account until I sue them separately? A children's toy is badly constructed and dangerous. The manufacturer is sued by an aggrieved parent. A court makes an award to the parent, and orders that sales of the toy be halted. All resellers receive a court order telling them to stop selling the product. Should they comply? I'm not seeing the hazard in having companies obey court orders even if they are not named parties. Presumably there is a process where they can refuse and get a court hearing about the validity of the order? Or is the issue that there is no such process? Edit: I'm reading Volokh's amicus now (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3038335/Hassell-v-Bird-Internet-Law-Scholars-Letter-1.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3038335/Hassell-v...), which makes it clearer that the distinction is something like "because speech is different". I don't really understand his argument, though, or why he keeps using "allegedly libelous" to describe something a court has found to be libelous. I think it's because he's arguing that the collection of comments (or reviews) published by Yelp is contextually different than the individual comment, and that one may be libelous and the other not. While there is some truth to this, I think there is a difference between a conscious compilation, and a "bulletin board" type system where posters can add whatever they wish without review.
- gcb0 10y ago
  the court was not holding yelp accountable, they asked yelp to remove a post that a jury found to be criminal. YouTube silences you without a court order or anything.
runholm 10y ago
What you are describing is a problem that exists only in the domain of Googles DMCA handling policies. The Yelp issue is in the domain of US law.

eeZi 10y ago

We don't have section 230 in Europe yet the sky isn't falling.

twblalock 10y ago
You don't have a vibrant tech sector either.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
guelo 10y ago
Yea, all the giant European social media companies are doing fine. Oh wait, they don't exist. I wonder why.
- eeZi 10y ago
  US companies like Facebook are doing business in Europe and have users in Europe, so they're subject to EU law.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    That could change. At some point, the cost of complying with EU regulation might be greater than the cost of shutting down the EU subsidiaries, and Facebook could do that, host all content in the US, and be subject to US law only. Would the EU block Facebook as a response? I doubt that will be a popular move.
    - eeZi 10y ago
      Neither of these are going to happen. Closing the EU subsidiary would be a PR disaster, especially after the recent lawsuit (Max Schrems vs. Facebook). While the EU obviously wouldn't block access to Facebook, I doubt that the cost of complying with regulation would be larger than shutting down their subsidiary. Think ad revenue, declining user base due to bad PR, and I don't think this move would go over well with their investors.

lambdasquirrel 10y ago

So, what if sites only have to remove the content if it's been ruled as defamatory? If it's some dumb little thing like an immature comment on a Youtube video, no big deal. If it's something injurious like a bad review on something that matters, then yeah, should be taken down. Am I missing something here?

twblalock 10y ago
The courts might make an exception for defamatory or libelous content, or they might undermine section 230 to the extent that it no longer works well, or they might reject it entirely. If section 230 is struck down, the consequences will not be limited to defamatory or libelous content.
- magicalist 10y ago
  > If section 230 is struck down to be clear here: a federal law cannot be struck down by a state court.

vinhboy 10y ago

I don't know why most of the comments on here, so far, are so nonchalant about this. > Hassell sued Bird for libel and won a judgment for more than $550,000 in damages and costs, as well as an injunction ordering Bird to remove the ostensibly defamatory material from Yelp This is fucking nuts. How can someone be sued for $550K for writing a bad yelp review. Can someone please explain why the law allows for ridiculous damages like this. If this is allowed, I would wipe my online identity and live in Tor permanently.

ap22213 10y ago
I think this probably happens much more frequently than people may realize. I once gave a doctor a bad Yelp review and was very careful to avoid stating anything that could be claimed as libel - I only stated very specific and accurate facts and my opinions of them. They still seemed to try to come after me for libel (but quickly gave up). Interestingly, I had even used a throwaway email address and Yelp account. But, they still tracked me down. I'm guessing that maybe they had Yelp pull the server logs, but I don't really know. My Yelp review was then hidden. And, the Doctor responded directly to my review, calling me out by name and essentially calling me a liar (I wasn't). I certainly didn't want to get messed up with a legal case, so I ignored it. However, it was a very startling experience.
- pstrateman 10y ago
  > the Doctor responded directly to my review, calling me out by name and essentially calling me a liar (I wasn't) That seems likely it would violate HIPAA in some way...
  - icantdrive55 10y ago
    We have a plastic surgeon, in in my county, that pissed off a lot of patients. She must have over 50 negative reviews. Well she sued most of them. I think the lawyer sued 45 of them. The judge ruled against all the lawsuits. All thrown out of court. Now, the physician resorts to describing what was physically wrong with the patient online in a rebuttal. For instance, "Susan--you seemed happy when we removed those ugly brown spots I removed?" I've been suprised she hasen't been accused of voilating HIPPA either. I don't use Yelp. I honestly try to stay away from most doctors--just don't like most of them. Out of all the professions, MD's seem to dislike Yelp the most. Gone are the days where they can treat patients like dirt, and the patient has no recourse--other than dying. It's too bad that physicians are so arrogant. I don't get it. The last twenty years have exposed the profession to be so much of an art? (I do try to recognize the Doctor who is taking on hard cases, and give that Doctor a large benefit of the doubt. For instance, the medi-cal Doctor gets a get out of jail free card, but most of the negative reviews are for the doctors who are charging $350.00 hr, in good areas of the county?)

morecoffee 10y ago

Can Yelp have it both ways? It seems Bird was ordered to remove the comment, but Hassel couldn't prove she made them. Yelp would either have to say that Bird made the comments, and absolve themselves of responsibility, or instead become responsible. Otherwise it would seem that any anonymous comment could be used to skip libel penalties. Surely there has to be precedent for this in the past few years.

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tomohawk 10y ago

Since sites like facebook seem to be taking more of an active role in censoring/curating comments and content, it seems like this exemption would no longer apply to them at some point.

makomk 10y ago
As the law currently stands, no. You can take an active role in curating comments and still be protected. You can even build a business model around charging people to remove defamatory information about them from your site, and Section 230 not only protects you from liability, it protects your business model by preventing the courts from forcing you to remove that content. A number of companies such as RipoffReport.com have built up very successful businesses around this model, and it's that which is endangered by this lawsuit.
- pif 10y ago
  > it protects your business model by preventing the courts from forcing you to remove that content. Well, than Section 230 is simply wrong. It's important not to hold Yelp responsible for what a user wrote on his forum, but I fail to see how it can be damaging for a site to delete some unlawful-ruled content (which it didn't create), apart from the immoral case you named.
  - morgante 10y ago
    The problem with that is that's putting Yelp into the position of censoring content. If the court thinks that a review is defamatory, they should just order the reviewer to take it down. No need to involve Yelp at all.
    - lsaferite 10y ago
      You say that like Yelp doesn't already self-censor to suit it's business needs.
      - 10y ago

keithpeter 10y ago

One wonders if Ava Bird is actually OK. Do people often drop off the grid like that and fail to respond to court papers &c? UK: I suspect the legal situation is a bit more complex here (it usually is), so perhaps the title should be 'most important law in the US'?

buro9 10y ago
> UK: I suspect the legal situation is a bit more complex here (it usually is), so perhaps the title should be 'most important law in the US'? reply It's simpler in the UK and EU at the moment. You want to look at the EU e-commerce directive, paragraph 43 and the definition of "mere conduit" in the appendix: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32000L0031&from=EN http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE... In essence, (and directly from the law): "Mere conduit" 1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider: (a) does not initiate the transmission; (b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and (c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.
- confounded 10y ago
  So, algorithmic curation completely changes classification. (Seems like a sensible law.)
- keithpeter 10y ago
  Excellent! Thanks for the specific reference
morgante 10y ago
> Do people often drop off the grid like that and fail to respond to court papers &c? Yes, all the time.

OliverJones 10y ago

Working for a nonprofit, I once was ripped off by a service provider. I posted a Yelp review describing the facts of the case and saying "would-be customers, be careful." This service provider retaliated by posting false and malicious statements about my character. Lucky we had a pro-bono lawyer, or this would have cost me thousands. As it is, it did cost the nonprofit thousands (in the ripoff). We wasted time too. (Hint: it's really hard to collect after you get a favorable judgement in small claims court. Small claims court is a waste of time unless you're making a claim against a deep-pocketed multinational corporation.) This experience taught me that Yelp is useless for anything except five-star reviews. The personal risk of using Yelp to tell the truth about bad service is simply too high.

ensignavenger 10y ago
It may depend on your jurisdiction, but I don't think in most jurisdictions it is any harder to collect a judgment from small clams court than it is any other judgment... but I know from personal experience how hard it can be to collect a judgment! (Though in my case, after a lot of perseverance, time and money, I was able to finally collect- and even if it wasn't worth the time, I would probably do it over again, for the experience and for the fact that I believe it will help keep the same person from ripping off someone else in the future- someone else that may not be able to fight back.

the_duke 10y ago

Please add "US" in the title. The world has more than one legal system.

jasongill 10y ago
I'd say it's pretty well established that SF means San Francisco, which is most definitely in the US.
- ci5er 10y ago
  I'm in the US, and I always read it as one of Science Fiction, Sugar Free, Semper Fi, Source Forge or even Stupidity Factor before I have to stop and think about what else it might mean. Not everyone on planet Earth uses California as the zero point in their mental coordinate system.

SeanDav 10y ago

> "Because of the immunity it grants to publishers who act as intermediaries for this flow of information and commentary, “Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet,” says Thomas Burke" If Yelp was a pure intermediary, perhaps they would have a case, but they are not and neither are any of the other companies mentioned. All these companies decide what they want to keep on their sites and what they want to remove. All of them can and do delete information and block accounts of people that break their rules. They should not be able to hide behind Section 230 by keeping information on their site that they know to be libellous or illegal and they should be prosecuted for doing so.

zaroth 10y ago
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "pure intermediary". Section 230 does not say that you have to publish all user-generated content indiscriminately in order for its safe-harbor to apply. IANAL, but that's not how I understand that Section 230 works. If it did work that way, I think the law would be horribly broken. No site hosting UGC can be completely un-moderated, and therefore by your reasoning, no site with UGC content could benefit from Section 230. Luckily, sites can exercise some measure of editorial control of their UGC while at the same time still benefiting from Section 230 protections. As the OP states, the law is often regarded as the legal backbone of the internet, and its protections for publishers should not be easily dismissed. What Yelp is demanding here is to be a named defendant if they are to be bound by the court decision, which is already the standard for newspapers. I think it's fair to expect to have a seat at the table if the courts are going to be ordering you to modify your site. Particularly because in this case there appear to be questions-of-fact regarding which reviews were even written by the defendant.

bcg1 10y ago

Couldn't Yelp just leave the comment up but add a message to note that it has ruled as defamation by the court? Maybe the court should structure its order like that, so that no content has to be removed but the plaintiff can get some relief.