Who You Givin’ Only One Star?

Yelp Inc. v. Superior Court, No. G054358 (D4d3 Nov. 13, 2017)

Discovery of anonymous poster information from Internet companies has been a hot topic in Court of Appeal lately. In the past year or so, there’s been a case about Google, and a pair of cases involving Glassdoor. This time it’s Yelp.

Following the first Glassdoor case—the court finds that Yelp had standing to raise its customer’s interest in remaining anonymous, because Yelp’s ability to maintain its reviewers anonymity is part and parcel of its very business. But then following the test from the second Glassdoor case, the court finds that the plaintiff has nonetheless made a sufficient prima facie showing of defamation to get at the information. So the court affirms the trial court’s order to produce the info. It reverses, however, on discovery sanctions. Given that the Glassdoor cases were decided after the trial court’s order, the issues presented in the dispute were novel enough that Yelp’s arguments in resisting the discovery were substantially justified.

Writ denied, sanctions order reversed.

This Would Make Me Yelp!

Hassell v. Bird, No. A143233 (D1d4 Jun. 7, 2016)

Wow. Back-to-back Yelp defamation cases. It must be a cottage industry or something. And while I might have had a few quibbles with some of the intermediate steps in the analysis on the last one, this one really manages to go off the rails.

Goods and Services in the Digital Age

Demetriades v. Yelp, No. B247151 (July 24, 2014)

A restaurant proprietor sued Yelp for false advertising, claiming that Yelp’s statements about the quality and accuracy of its review filtering software were false and misleading. Yelp responded with an anti-SLAPP motion, arguing that the statements were protected activity under Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16(e). But according to the court, that doesn’t matter, because the statements at issue fall within the commercial speech exception in § 425.17(c). The exception applies when (i) defendant is in the business of selling goods or services, (ii) the statements at issue are statements of fact about those goods or services, (iii) the statements were made for the purpose of procuring a transaction in those goods and services, and (iv) the statements are directed to likely consumers of defendant’s goods or services. Those requirements were satisfied here. Although user reviews posted on Yelp are generally outside the exception, Yelp's statements about the quality of its own filtering software are not. The latter are clearly aimed at encouraging businesses to buy ads on the Yelp platform.

Reversed.