January 12, 2009 | Digital Rights

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that a San Fran chiropracter is suing a local artist who wrote a bad review of him in Yelp, the crowd-sourced business review site.

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here.

The dispute was over the doctor’s billing practices, not medical care.  Ironically, he’s probably damaged his business much more than if he had left well enough alone.  The artist started a website to raise money for his defense.

Interesting, the article states that Yelp isn’t liable under the Communications Decency Act for third-party reviews. I think that’s appropriate, otherwise review sites like that couldn’t exist.

This case brings up the question of what exactly you should be able to say on the web about somebody or something. (Note: IANAL) But since truth is generally considered a defense against charges of libel, I’d say the doctor is in a bad way if the artist can demonstrate his seemingly mundane billing-related claims.

That still means the defendant will have to pay his defense lawyer up until the verdict, but hopefully a loss for the chiropractor will dissuade other service providers from suing reviewers.

If you liked this article

If you liked this article, don’t forget to subscribe for updates!

Get updates by RSS (What’s RSS?)

Subscribe by email:

Follow me on Twitter

Top Incoming Search Terms

"chiropractor" "commentluv enabled" artist chiropractor bad review chiropractic bad reviews on chiropractors chiropractor bad billing chiropractor bad review chiropractor review site chiropractor sues over review intitle:chiropractor"commentluv" yahoo sues over bad reviews

Related posts:

1. WikiLeaks Sues The Guardian for Leak This is getting weird. WikiLeaks, the organization devoted to transparency...
2. WikiLeaks Archive of Climategate CRU E-Mail Files Although I mentioned the East Anglia E-mails site (http://eastangliaemails.com/) in...

Explore related content: libel, Yelp