Yelp Not Liable For Negative Reviews

A federal appeals court dismissed a libel lawsuit brought by a Washington locksmith against Yelp, attempting to hold the consumer rating website accountable for negative reviews left on the site. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed a lower-court decision that Yelp is protected under the Communications Decency Act, which says online content providers generally do not bear civil liability for content published by a third party. Douglas Kimzey, who filed the lawsuit in 2011, claimed the negative review was actually about another business, and said Yelp transferred it to his business in an attempt to extort him to pay for advertising on the site. “We fail to see how Yelp’s rating system, which is based on rating inputs from third parties and which reduces this information into a single, aggregate metric, is anything other than user-generated data,” Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote in the unanimous three-judge panel decision.