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?
It isn’t working. This isn’t a hypothetical problem.
The goal is to kill the competition, no local delivery service can compete with a few million in VC funding. Once you are the only delivery in town you can raise the prices all you want and force the local restaurants into one sided deals on your terms. It also has a rather questionable legality
When it's goods and not services (delivery is the service here, I guess, not the food as a good), usually it's termed dumping, and I'm fairly sure it's illegal. I don't know if that language ever gets used for services.
I think the core issue here is that some platforms were creating websites and phone numbers to impersonate the companies. In practice it's a man-in-the-middle attack. This is what the law seems to intend to stop. I'm pretty sure that if I falsified a website to resell services or products on behalf of a larger company I would get slapped by a lawsuit, trademark or otherwise, but it seems that for small restaurants th…
Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same. This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.
Impersonation is illegal, but GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent.
To resolve this under existing law we’d need to wait for a lawsuit to roll through the courts. The legislature passes laws all the time that are somewhat duplicative to clarify their intent. The law isn’t a normalized database, and that actually speeds things up.
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.
I don't think Uber Eats has a support page that says "Submit your amateur cease and desist letters here". A $300 trademark is a cheap business expense, using it to scare away massive corporations is expensive.
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.
I agree with the sentiment. But you basically have no recourse if you get food poisoning from a restaurant. Unless it’s a mass event, there’s no way for you to prove it was the restaurant, and even if you could prove it, your damages aren’t likely to be enough to sue.
always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest. edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with th…
Yea, I do wonder if this will shut the door on any future high growth independent startups in the space to be created locally. DoorDash started their business doing exactly this in Palo Alto, and likely wouldn’t have been able to raise the funds or grow at the pace they did without this strategy. On one hand, you could say good, these sorts of businesses are exploitative. But I’m not sure that the industry is a net n…
It seems like an agreement or explicit description of what is happening (the delivery service is providing the food, not the restaurant) is going to be part of any sustainable model.
There was a post a few months go about a pizza place that started getting customers complaining about their food arriving cold and damaged: except they didn't offer delivery. They discovered that a popular search engine was offering free delivery. The story ended with them ordering dozens of pizzas from themselves to themselves and making a nice profit.
Similar story but with Door Dash. Explanation: Door Dash charged lower than actual price, so owner placed an order and sent just plain dough. Their profit was higher than cost of making the pizza. https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitra...
for even more profit become a doordash driver and exclusively ‘deliver’ these pizzas.
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.
Well, pseudo-open source licenses. They're certainly not OSI approved, which is the benchmark most go by. And it's not really a "lot," in part because most organizations won't touch open source software that isn't on a usually fairly short list of licenses approved for use.
always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest. edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with th…
The barn door needs to be closed. I don't care if it means there won't be more doordashes if the only way those companies can exist is by scamming customers and exploiting restaurants. I don't see why this is a problem. They're called "growth hacks" for a reason. If your concern is that people won't be able to compete with DoorDash now without breaking the law, maybe DoorDash should be penalized for past misbehavior... If you follow this "but banning this will prevent competition!" logic to its conclusion now it's logically inappropriate to make all sorts of things illegal because fraudsters got rich doing them and it would prevent competition.
Personally I think it's possible for delivery apps to succeed without breaking the law. Similarly I believe a cab-hailing app can succeed without breaking the law. The fact that the big players in both markets have made "regulatory arbitrage" and lawbreaking a core part of their business model (protected by massive amounts of venture capital and highly paid lawyers) is not a reason to get rid of the laws they broke.
Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?
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.
How does it violate trademark law to say that “we will deliver food from restaurant X”? It seems clear to the customer who is providing the goods vs the service. What’s not clear is if there is an agreement, which is what this new law makes clear.