41–46 of 46 posts
You might say this is frivolous lawsuit, and I'd agree. The plaintiffs have zero chance of winning, there is no coercion, there is no semblance of employment. But. Take a moment to think. What is the value of a website like this, without the user-generated content? A Yelp with no reviews, no photos, etc. is just a phonebook. Alternatively, a restaurant review with no platform, no audience is just a journal entry. It'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write as if the suit has a chance. The suit has no chance, none, zilch, zero. They were not forced to write the reviews. Imagine me and you suing ycombinator, because our post on HN adds value to the site. How absurd.
" The suit has no chance, none, zilch, zero" Agree that (from what I read) the "suit" has no chance. But the job of a good attorney is to find a leg to stand on. An attorney has taken the case. A leg to stand on has been presented. From a quick (I mean literally quick) scan it appears that Yelp pulled one of the parties "Elite" status as an example. The action here appears to present a case to get benefit out of Yelp…
An attorney has taken the case."
That doesn't imply that the attorney who has taken the case is a good attorney. And he may just be doing it to get free publicity.
You might say this is frivolous lawsuit, and I'd agree. The plaintiffs have zero chance of winning, there is no coercion, there is no semblance of employment. But. Take a moment to think. What is the value of a website like this, without the user-generated content? A Yelp with no reviews, no photos, etc. is just a phonebook. Alternatively, a restaurant review with no platform, no audience is just a journal entry. It'…
Here's a larger point from the mid twentieth century: what is the real value of a broadcast TV network with the viewers? IN a sense, the product the network produces is ad views, with the work being done by the audience. I'm not saying that the audience is an employee, just that the model of not paying for value created by a crowd is large and old.
Does he have any value to Yelp as eyeball for advertisers? No. If Yelp's audience consisted completely of people like him, no one would ever advertise on Yelp again, no restaurant owner would ever pay Yelp for premium whatever status thing they sell.
But our fictional user can write reviews that are consumed by other users. He is providing real value to Yelp, as a non-eyeball.
In the television case, this guy is completely worthless.
Facebook is a simpler example, because most people are both supplying content and seeing ads. If there were no content, no one would go there to see the ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" The suit has no chance, none, zilch, zero" Agree that (from what I read) the "suit" has no chance. But the job of a good attorney is to find a leg to stand on. An attorney has taken the case. A leg to stand on has been presented. From a quick (I mean literally quick) scan it appears that Yelp pulled one of the parties "Elite" status as an example. The action here appears to present a case to get benefit out of Yelp…
" But the job of a good attorney is to find a leg to stand on. An attorney has taken the case. " That doesn't imply that the attorney who has taken the case is a good attorney. And he may just be doing it to get free publicity.
A really good point and I actually meant to mention that as a reason the case might have been accepted.
But that said even though I am generally a believer that any publicity is good as an attorney you wouldn't want to come off as a total laughing stock in order to get publicity. So while we definitely don't know if he is a "good attorney" we do know that he was able to get an attorney to take the case. I wasn't able to find much on the attorney. So he has (quick guess) everything to gain and not much to lose.
Of course I could offer as a counter to my argument the facebook case (Paul Ceglia) [1] [2] which was a total joke but he managed to get a prominent law firm to represent him in that case and they certainly screwed up on that one.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57541140/
[2] http://allthingsd.com/20110727/fourth-law-firm-withdraws-fro...
"...textbook example of a frivolous lawsuit" - Yelp Agreed. But let's just say, they win. Would this force sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to go the YouTube route and pay the really popular ones? --well anyone can make money on YouTube, but unless your popular, your not going to make anything significant-- People already do this with sponsored tweets and pics, but it's not Twitter that's actually paying t…
The precedent of such a suit would be staggering; I can't count on two hands the number of major Internet companies that derive the vast-majority of their content from user-generated content. Kinda weird to be fiercely on the side of a company I dislike, but I hope Yelp doesn't have to spend too much money on pointless legal fees here.
You write as if the suit has a chance. The suit has no chance, none, zilch, zero. They were not forced to write the reviews. Imagine me and you suing ycombinator, because our post on HN adds value to the site. How absurd.