A Tale of Two Lawsuits

Thanks to sites like Yelp, online citizen reviews are often the first thing people read about local businesses. So it's not surprising that business owners are trying to police online criticism. In a typical case, the merchant brings a defamation suit against the author of a bad review. Should courts protect the reviewer's free speech or protect the merchant from unfair criticism? What are the bounds of online criticism?

Courts around the globe are grappling with these questions. Two cases from last week illustrate the divergent approaches they can take--with dramatically different consequences for online freedom.

In California, a plastic surgeon sued a Yelp reviewer for a post complaining that the doctor lasered her skin "too deeply." The judge slammed the surgeon for attacking the reviewer's free speech:

A Marin County cosmetic surgeon who filed a defamation suit against an online reviewer was ordered to pay nearly $20,000 in attorney's fees after a judge dismissed the case "with prejudice in its entirety."

Dr. Kimberly Henry of Greenbrae was also told to pay a $2,000 award to the defendant's lawyer for the "public interest benefit" of his work on the case.

. . .

"(Henry) was clearly trying to penalize Defendant's fundamental right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States," [Judge] Chernus wrote.

On the other side of the globe, a restaurant owner in Taiwan initiated proceedings against a reviewer who had complained that the food was "too salty." The cases may seem similar, but the results could not have been more different:

The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant’s beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention [suspended] and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant.

. . .

The Taichung District Court ruled that Liu’s criticism of the restaurant exceeded reasonable bounds and sentenced her to 30 days in detention, a ruling that Liu appealed.

The High Court found that Liu’s criticism about cockroaches in the restaurant to be a narration of facts, not intentional slander.

However, the judge also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit.

The Taiwan decision seems to disrespect both the reviewer and the audience. Instead of squelching speech, the court might have given the reader some credit for critical thinking. People should be allowed to take online reviews with a grain of salt, so to speak.