After holding Yelp in contempt, Virginia court rules against anonymous reviewers
13.01 2014
by Nick Vivion, Tnooz
User generated reviews have exploded in popularity over the past few years, with industry leader TripAdvisor becoming one of the most valuable travel companies in the process. Another user review site has been seeing enormous growth, to the tune of over 100 million unique monthly visitors - Yelp. Known primarily for restaurant reviews, the site has been growing the breadth of reviews to include all kinds of services. One such service is Hadeed Carpet Cleaning in Alexandria, Virginia.
The case
The business owner, after becoming suspicious that some of the negative reviews were not from actual customers (by allegedly checking their own customer database), asked Yelp to turn over the identifying information of the reviewers. ...
After holding Yelp in contempt, Virginia court rules against anonymous reviewers
