YELP WARNS CALIFORNIA LAWSUIT COULD SCRUB CRITICAL REVIEWS
Sep 17, 10:29 AM EDT
YELP WARNS CALIFORNIA LAWSUIT COULD SCRUB CRITICAL
REVIEWS
BY SUDHIN THANAWALA ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yelp.com is warning that a
California lawsuit targeting critical posts about a law firm could lead to the
removal of negative reviews and leave consumers with a skewed assessment of
restaurants and other businesses.
Lawyer Dawn Hassell said the business review website is
exaggerating the stakes of her legal effort, which aims only to remove from
Yelp lies, not just negative statements, that damaged the reputation of her law
firm.
Though its impact is in dispute, the case is getting
attention from some of the biggest Internet companies in the world, which say a
ruling against Yelp could stifle free speech online and effectively gut other
websites whose main function is offering consumers reviews of services and
businesses.
A San Francisco judge determined the posts were
defamatory and ordered the company to remove them two years ago, which a second
judge and a state appeals court upheld.
Yelp is asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the
order. The high court faces an Oct. 14 deadline to decide whether to hear the
case or let the lower-court ruling stand. Experts expect Yelp to prevail.
"There were a lot of people who were unhappy about
this opinion," said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law
Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.
Internet giants Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft said in a
letter to the California Supreme Court last month that the ruling
"radically departs from a large, unanimous and settled body of federal and
state court precedent" and could be used to "silence a vast quantity
of protected and important speech."
Yelp said it would give businesses unhappy about negative
reviews a new legal pathway for getting them removed. They could sue the person
who posted the content and then get a court order demanding the Internet
company remove it.
But Hassell disputes the ruling would do anything that
drastic.
Her 2013 lawsuit accused a client she briefly represented
in a personal injury case of defaming her on Yelp by falsely claiming that her
firm failed to communicate with the client, among other things.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Donald Sullivan
ordered the client and Yelp to remove the statements. Hassell said the client
failed to answer her lawsuit or remove the posts, so she had to seek a court
order demanding that Yelp do it.
"We have an impeccable reputation," she said of
her firm, Hassell Law Group. "We have a right to protect it."
Yelp says the judge's order violates a 1996 federal law
that courts have widely interpreted as protecting Internet companies from
liability for posts by third-party users.
A federal appeals court cited the law in a Monday ruling
saying Yelp's star rating system did not make it responsible for a negative
review of a Washington state locksmith business because the overall rating is
based on user reviews.
In Hassell's case, a three-judge appeals panel has said
the order requiring Yelp to remove the defamatory statements did not violate
the 1996 Communications Decency Act because the company was not facing
liability. That's because Hassell's lawsuit named her former client and not
Yelp, the appellate court said.
The review site says the law is broader and prevents the
courts from treating the company as the speaker or publisher of users' posts
regardless of whether it's named in a lawsuit.
The ruling "would really inhibit a website's ability
to provide a balanced spectrum of views online and make it more doubtful that
people would get the information they need to make informed decisions,"
said Aaron Schur, Yelp's senior director of litigation.
Yelp uses an algorithm to weed out biased and malicious
reviews and encourages users to contact the company if they receive a final
determination from a court that a review is defamatory.
In Hassell's case, Yelp has questioned the court's
finding that the posts were defamatory.
Hassell said her lawsuit will not affect negative reviews
on Yelp. She said she was the victim of lies and spent a considerable amount of
effort and money to get a court to rule that the former client's comments were
defamatory.
"You can give critical reviews about people on the
Internet," she said. "It doesn't mean it's going to be defamation.
You can't write untruthful content to hurt somebody."
Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law
didn't think the courts treated Hassell differently because her business is a
law firm, as opposed to a restaurant or other business in the service industry.
Daphne Keller, an Internet law expert at Stanford Law
School and former attorney at Google, said prior court decisions favor Yelp and
she would be surprised if the California Supreme Court didn't reverse the
ruling.
"It should be a no-brainer for Yelp to win,"
she said.
© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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