PPP Board Member Professor Eric Goldman recently posted on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog about the amicus briefs recently filed in an important First Amendment case before the California Supreme Court. Here is an excerpt of that post:
You surely recall the Hassell v. Bird ruling from last year. A lawyer was unhappy with a Yelp review about her. The lawyer sued the putative author (with dubious service of process), got a default ruling that the review was defamatory along with a removal injunction, and then delivered the injunction to Yelp and demanded removal. Yelp refused to remove the review. In a shocking turn of events, the California appeals court held that Yelp was required to remove the review. That ruling accomplished a rare trifecta. It screwed up not one, not two, but THREE cherished American legal principles: the First Amendment, Due Process, and Section 230. If it survives, the consequences of the appellate court’s ruling could be severe: it would create a giant workaround to Section 230, and it would create a synthetic right to be forgotten in the US. Fortunately, the California Supreme Court granted a petition to review. This blog post will summarize what’s happened since then.
Read the full post here.