Proposal: Right to Fair Review (RFR) Association

[amirm]

The reviewers association is be a good idea, but a twist could be the addition of some kind of review agreement or covenant, given to the manufacturer, stating that the manufacturer will not sue if the review will not be to their liking.

I think this will be a showstopper for any manufacturer to join the association. Maybe we could get them to agree to mediation and cap on damages.

 

[WhoSaidThat]

Might a standard disclaimer, written by a suitably qualified attorney, and tagged onto the end of every review cover most, if not all, issues?

 

[amirm]

I think that would be useful to have but we need more than that.

 

[Vince2]

I belief we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Creating an organization that established best practices for it's members and finding a liability insurance coverage for the members would be a good start. The liability insurance would provide initial legal consult.

 

[Easternlethal]

In some ways I'm a bit dissapointed this didn't go to court. I understand it's an expensive and complicated process but once over, assuming the plaintive lost, which seems highly likely in the current case, a precedent would have been set I believe and the industry would consider more carefully threats of legal action.

There are plenty of precedents where people have gone after newspapers and websites but these won’t deter people like tekton.

At the end of the day there is nothing to stop a manufacturer from threatening legal action whether rightly or wrongly and that’s what causes the headache because the reviewer then has to assess the claim, research the law and respond.

What Amir is proposing is an organisation which the reviewer could hand this off to.

So if say, Eric threatens and asks for a personal address or legal representative, Amir could pass him the contact for such an organisation to take forwards.

Such organisation would be funded and have a panel of lawyers who could then reply on Amir’s behalf, which could potentially also insure against any costs and hassle going forwards. It could also make a counterclaim if the tactics were overly aggressive.

Doesn’t take away the stress entirely but at least the reviewer will get more support.

 

[MonkeyKing]

I think this will be a showstopper for any manufacturer to join the association. Maybe we could get them to agree to mediation and cap on damages.

What you need to do is make things balanced. For example, the reviewers could need to follow a covenant of their own. Perhaps, agree to publish their methods and be transparent about the methodology and how their decision is arrived at. Nobody is going to agree to anything if they don't believe its fair and balanced. Then hopefully you get participation by all sides and lawsuits are minimized if not completely avoided.

 

[Steven Holt]

Thank you Amir for your suggestion -- I'm in total agreement. Does anybody remember, didn't Bose try to pull this stuff in the '70's, when reviewers began to give negative reviews of the 901 series? Those reviews were well - deserved, but I believe that the threat of lawsuit did cause more than a few to back down.

 

[Eulipian]

I am not an expert here, but I think it's the litigious (and often frivolous) US system you need to worry about. You can sue for emotional distress over crap... you can claim to be misled against public evidence to the contrary and what not. It's a multibillion dollar biz in the US. You can claim you didn't know your coffee was that hot and sue for millions when you idiotically spill it on yourself. Etcetera. Internationally, I have never heard about the ridiculous cases that make it into the system into the USA. Which is also why any sort of insurance against those will be expensive.

I do work in large high tech silicon valley companies, and cease and desist stuff is everyday stuff, and it always gets settled out of court 99% of the time.

In the sprit of fact-driven analysis, let me help you with the greedy-plaintiff hot-coffee case. This was a huge PR win for the insurance companies . The facts as reported by the Center for Justice and Democracy are here McDonald's Coffee Facts

[Moderator: feel free to delete the above]

My comment on Amir's proposal I think there's great merit in beating back bullies who use threats of litigation as anti-competitive tools to increase or maintain market share. There are attorney members more expert in IP, defamation, and unfair competition than I, but one vein outside of IP proper are cases involving non-competes. The news there generally is not good for the bullies in that arena and there are analogue principles related to unfair competition.

My suggestion: Instead of focusing solely on developing a standardized process for lawyering up, which is no doubt warranted, could principles and testing standards be standardized through ANSI? Way out of my wheelhouse here, but ANSI standards come up frequently in products cases and serve as a defense to product and consumer safety cases. The International Society of Workplace Investigators has gotten ANSI approval for its group and standards, and consumer audio testing might be amenable to similar treatment.

My question: taking the idea "next level" (as the young people say), if an organization is contemplated, would it be possible to develop ANSI certification standards including: member certification standards, tests conducted by a member of Audio "X" (Musk will want it to himself) using the following tools calibrated to mfr spec and used according to protocol 123, subjective impressions are identified as such. It's a lot of work, but engineers love that kind of detail and standardization analysis.....don't you?

 

[Madcow]

I think suing someone for their personal opinions violates the right to freedom of speech. It won’t go anywhere because it would single handedly destroy the entire world where auto reviews, phone review, electronics and everything else we would all get sued! So I say let em file and take it to court unless there is something we aren’t being told???

 

[Duke]

Maybe we could get [manufacturers] to agree to mediation and cap on damages.

I realize a contract that protects reviewers is probably necessary if the Tekton event is indicative of what "the new reality" is, and I am NOT saying such a contract is a bad idea. It is probably a very good idea.

But as a small manufacturer who may someday have something reviewed, it makes me sick to my stomach that reviewers may very well now legitimately need to be protected from us. Yuck.

 

[amirm]

My suggestion: Instead of focusing solely on developing a standardized process for lawyering up, which is no doubt warranted, could principles and testing standards be standardized through ANSI?

Our speaker measurements are already an ANSI standard (CEA-2034 is). I explained this as my first response to Tekton. It made no difference to him.

 

[beefkabob]

Probably unnecessary. Possibly helpful. There are probably journalistic resources available already for this kind of thing. I doubt you need to reinvent the wheel.

 

[amirm]

I am not aware of any such resources.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Products submitted by members break the chain because the manufacturer did not submit the product, and poor results might be specific to that one submitted item, or other factors.

The same is true the other way around. Think golden sample...

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Probably unnecessary. Possibly helpful. There are probably journalistic resources available already for this kind of thing. I doubt you need to reinvent the wheel.

Not to my knowledge, having worked in the field min Germany for 40+ years.

 

[beefkabob]

journanlist legal aid - Google Search

There are a lot of laws protecting reviews. Of course it's possibly to run afoul of them, but doing so takes effort.

This is an overreaction to a bullying turd of a company.

 

[rxp]

I know ConsumerLab.com were sued by ZeroWater for their report that ZeroWater's filter added 10x the amount of microplastics to tap water despite their claims it removed it. Those sorts of organisations will surely have legal/admin infrastructure to cope with these sorts of things that you can replicate.

 

[Phorize]

Just thinking out loud. Its understandable that someone who has just been threatened with an obviously vexacious law suit would look to create a resource that responded to the legal elements of this. However, I can't help thinking that this was more a story of conflict management than legal argument. There is a body of good practice in conflict resolution that could be generalised into ethical/practical guidance on how to handle disputed reviews. Providing general legal guidance will be tricky unless we are making assumptions about which jurisdiction the litigant would take action in. I've worked with these people in the past and they were brilliant:

Dispute Resolution, Conflict Management & Mediation Services - CEDR

The Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) specialises in mediation, conflict management & Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) services & training

www.cedr.com

 

[amirm]

Providing general legal guidance will be tricky unless we are making assumptions about which jurisdiction the litigant would take action in.

We have federal laws that can be covered as over-arching guidance (free speech, consumer review rights, etc.). And then add state to state coverage as we can. There are plenty of guides like this. Ron post one about SLAPP for every state for example.

 

[amirm]

Someone mentioned contacting general counsel at Amazon, etc. I would think this kind of organization could reach out to them for funding, support and feedback as well.