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California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

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Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#161

Post by kgantchev »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #141
ummonk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?

Creating and defending a trademark is very expensive. Many restaurants would prefer not to spend this money just to prevent unauthorized listings. They’d rather delegate the responsibility of preventing unauthorized listings to the state attorney who has more resources and expertise.

That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information

Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#162

Post by ghaff »

lkbm wrote: post #158
ghaff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they have to do is get permission from the restaurants.

That's an extra amount of work that keeps new, small players from entering the field. As with a lot of regulation, this is designed in a way that favors large incumbents.

Eh, food delivery is a pretty local business. In fact, if I wanted to compete with these VC-backed companies, I'd probably do something like partner with local restaurants whose food traveled well, come up with some good packaging, etc. Of course, that's not scalable and disruptive.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#163

Post by MisterBastahrd »

foogazi wrote: post #101
DevKoala wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? In this case small businesses were being abused by delivery apps. Once these apps captured the customers of the small business, they converted the customers to their alternative offering restaurant. This is a good piece of legislature unless I am missing something.

How were businesses being abused? Do you mean customers use the app to order from X-Pizza, the app then prominently lists Y-Pizza and now X loses customers?

Customer orders pizza from SmallCorp through BigCorp.

BigCorp pizza arrives late, with wrong order because BigCorp transcribed it wrong, or because BigCorp's courier failed to double check all the items.

Customer gets incorrect and incomplete order from BigCorp.

Customer calls BigCorp to complain.

BigCorp tells customer to contact SmallCorp if they have an issue.

So now SmallCorp has an issue where even though they correctly fulfilled the order sent to them by BigCorp, the customer (who they have no record of) is unsatisfied.

I've experienced this personally from both of the "red letter" food delivery apps.

Just as bad is when they screw up and add "pick up" as an option for a company who never agreed to take pick up orders. Last week I ordered meals for my family, arrived at the place, they had no record of me placing the order because they did not do business with BigCorp.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#164

Post by privong »

kgantchev wrote: post #161
MichaelApproved wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating and defending a trademark is very expensive. Many restaurants would prefer not to spend this money just to prevent unauthorized listings. They’d rather delegate the responsibility of preventing unauthorized listings to the state attorney who has more resources and expertise.

That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.

> Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free.

Enforcing it is free if your time is free.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#165

Post by ghaff »

dalbasal wrote: post #57

The "uberfication" startup model had/has the same internet economics magic that dropshipping, crowdsourcing and such had, but for VC backed startups. As usual, XKCD captures the jist: https://xkcd.com/1060/ Users order food. App for that. Food is delivered by non-employees. HR is an app. Suppliers don't have to know they're suppliers. The CEO can focus on visionary statements. A software business has magic economics…

The amazing thing is how much money you can lose while doing so little.

I guess funneling money from investors to landlords by way of software developers is more expensive than it looks.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#166

Post by paxys »

th3iedkid wrote: post #70

If cloud-provider X is providing a managed-service A , which is otherwise available as an open-source project Y. Does X need an agreement from Y to run the managed service ? If X does a bad job of providing value from Y, isn't X showcasing Y in a bad-light as well?

Depends on how Y is licensed. A lot of open source projects are now specifically adding clauses preventing AWS etc. from offering their product as a hosted service.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#167

Post by wegs »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #150
s_dev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the downvotes -- I think there is a genuine question here. There isn't the need for more laws just enforcement of existing ones. Purporting to represent someone elses business is an egregious infringement of trademark.

The answer is likely that our legal system is too expensive for local restaurant owners to afford the cost of suing a grubhub sized company. Restaurants are a business notoriously prone to failure and low margins. Maybe a class action lawsuit would work in this case, but mostly it’s just another case where the legal system needs to be fixed to rely less on having money for justice to occur.

Two things which would help are:

1) Allow both private and public right-of-action for most laws. If the AG is busy, I should be able to sue. If I can't afford to sue, an AG should be able to take it up on my behalf.

2) Go back to circa 1800 style courts, where you don't need a lawyer to represent you. You both make your case to the judge. Not too much procedure. Perhaps extending small claims court up to $100,000 would do much of the same.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#168

Post by novaleaf »

privong wrote: post #164
kgantchev wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.

> Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. Enforcing it is free if your time is free.

time, and knowledge of how to write such a letter in a way to seem "serious legal threat"

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#169

Post by bitlevel »

ramphastidae wrote: post #105

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…

Totally agree.

And how about this: If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, you deal directly with them to resolve.

If the food has been delivered by a 3rd party, what rights to resolve would you then have?

Restaurants can simply state that the food was tainted after it left them, delivery firms can state the food from the restaurant was bad, etc etc.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#170

Post by TeMPOraL »

ummonk wrote: post #109
ramphastidae wrote: post #105

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…

Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?

The problem doesn't seem that related to trademarks to me. These app delivery platforms are impersonating companies, not selling their own products under someone else's brand. The food comes from where they claim it did. The issue with impersonation is that customers who got worse experience (cold food, long delivery, etc.) end up blaming the restaurant for it, even though the restaurant had nothing to do with it.
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