Can French winemakers sue us for bad reviews?

[SteveTimko]

There is an article about Frenchchefs seeking to ban reviews of restaurantson places like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

It links to another article where an Italian restaurant in France got a judgment of $3,000, including court costs, against a blogger who wrote an unfavorable review of a restaurant.

Seems like freedom of the press is a foreign concept in France.

So can a Champagne house drag Sharon into court? If I visit the communal tasting room in Gigondas and write up some notes for CellarTracker!, am I going to get a taste of Provencal justice?

 

[Jeff Grossman]

IANAL but it seems to me that there'd be some tricky business in filing suit in a court that has jurisdiction. They're there and the non-French among us are not, eh?

 

[kirk wallace]

Well, IAAL,BNAFO, but i'll try anyway. With the blogger and Il Giardino, there is not really a free speech (in the US sense) issue, as no governmental restriction was involved. I have no idea what France's liable and defamation laws are, but they are always reported in the press to be stricter than in the US; so perhaps that was a factor in her case.

As for the chefs' lobbying the government to require that yelp reviews and their ilk to be moderated so as to establish some baseline veracity, that does implicate what we think of as free speech issues, but a) the story doesn't say whether the government is likely to agree to impose such restrictions, and b) even under our 1st amendment we accept that in certain circumstances there can be reasonable regulation of speech (e.g., truth in labeling laws, drug efficacy claims, etc.). Hard to stretch that to amateur restaurant reviews, it seems to me, but hey, right now, nothing in a world without SFJoe makes sense to me.

As for posting on cellar tracker (et al) being deemed defamatory in France, yes, Jeff is right that there are jurisdictional issues --or at least on collecting against a US person with no French situs assets on a judgment rendered in a French court applying French law, but you wouldn't want to be like Dick Chaney, forced to never enter the EU because of outstanding warrants, would you?