By Mandi Woodruff
Yahoo Finance
Before you decide to trash your neighborhood coffee shop or local plumber on Yelp, take a look at how things ended for a Virginia homeowner who bashed her contractor on the popular review site.
Though her reviews were found to be defamatory, Perez caught a break: the jury found that Dietz had defamed her as well when he responded to her negative reviews with accusations of his own. With both parties guilty, they decided neither deserved to recoup damages.
In the world of online reviewing, it seems two wrongs don’t make a right. Continued
Chris Ingle, Chair of Rose Law Group Cyber-Law Deaprtment, says:
The recent Yelp decision demonstrates that people need to be careful about what they post online. When the internet was new it was a little bit of the Wild West – you could get away with a fair bit of dubious conduct. But then there was a crackdown on music downloading, and then movie downloading, and the latest crackdown is in the field of online defamation. This is a real thing, and everyone from business owners to individuals needs to recognize the potential liability that can stem from posting a bad review on the internet. It’s just as dangerous as illegal downloading, and the consequences can be a lot worse. A typical downloading case might settle for a couple thousand dollars. These cases can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, or even millions of dollars.
It’s not that the people who file these lawsuits are necessarily being vindictive. A bad review on the internet can have a huge impact on the subject person or business, and if that review is false, those individuals may need to go to court to clear their good name. With some websites, getting a court order is the only way to get the bad review off the internet. Oftentimes the plaintiffs don’t even want to file a lawsuit, all they want is to get the report off the internet. And if the only way to do that is to get a court order, then they don’t really have a lot of choice except to go to court.
If you want to go online to complain about a person or a business you dislike, you better make sure that you have your facts straight. The law allows you to say virtually anything you want so long as it is factually accurate. As courts love to say, “truth is an absolute defense to defamation.” And if you want to add some commentary, hyperbole, or personal opinion to your report, you need to make sure that you clearly indicate that those portions of the report are exactly that – your personal opinion. A good rule of thumb is that if you want to say something especially damaging about someone else, you should preface it with the words “in my personal opinion” or “It is my belief that…” and then continue with the rest of your report. You are entitled to hold any opinion you want, and you have a First Amendment right to speak your mind to other people. But when you write or imply false, defamatory facts (not opinion) about someone else, you can easily find yourself in litigation.
I am not entirely sure that I agree with the assessment of insurance coverage under a homeowners or renters’ policy. Typically those policies cover accidents, which in the legal world is referred to as negligence. But all of the policies I’ve seen exclude intentional wrongdoing. If someone alleged that you went online and purposefully posted information that you knew to be false, then it may very well be excluded from coverage. In the real world I have seen businesses get coverage for defamation cases under comprehensive general liability (CGL) policies, but I have never seen a person obtain coverage under a homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy. I’m not saying that it could not happen; I’m just saying that I handle a lot of these types of lawsuits and I’ve never seen an insurance company provide such coverage.
Chris Ingle can be reached at cingle@roselawgroup.com
