Internet marketing has long been a double-edged sword. A successful viral advertisement can rocket a brand to social media stardom overnight, but those same tools enable unhappy customers to share their bad experiences with a wider audience than ever before. Smart companies understand that the power of user generated contentor UGCis that it is at least somewhat out of control. They craft their brand strategies accordingly, using social media to address customer concerns directly and publicly, rewarding social media influencers and picking their battles. But still, the courts remain full of litigants who do not seem to have gotten the message.
In particular, some businesses continue to attempt to use intellectual property law to stop customers from sharing their experiences on the Internet. These are not cases involving the posting of trade secrets or confidential information, nor are they cases of defamation or trade liable. Rather, they are case where a business attempts to systematically prohibit the posting of user-generated negative reviews to a website such as Yelp, whether or not those reviews are accurate, purportedly on the basis of some intellectual property right. In the absence of some extraordinary circumstance, the New York courts have not responded favorably to this approach, as a few recent decisions demonstrate.
‘Lee v. Makhnevich’
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