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A comment on I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare. Parent comment

Re:I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nigh... by coding123 on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @01:39PM (#17181299)
This is a civil case obviously, so all that jail stuff won't apply to this, but just curious... If cheap litigation is 20K, and "battling out with a judge" is 100K how come the first time I'm hearing about this is in a HN comment? Seems like no one is going up to bat against this stuff until it affects them.

Reminds me of that famous poem "First they came for the ..."

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Re:I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nigh... by Jach on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @04:47PM (#17182795)
Peter Thiel got a lot of flak for this comment: "If you’re middle class, if you’re upper middle class, if you’re a single digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system. It costs too much. This was the modus operandi of Gawker in large part, to go after people who had no chance of fighting back."

It's somewhat hard to square with "litigious culture" criticisms of some parts of the country. But the details matter. Filing & defending in small-claims court is pretty cheap without a lawyer (and even with one is "only" in the small thousands) and person-vs-person cases won't be too terrible compared to companies-vs-individuals...

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Re:I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nigh... by dmitrygr on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @02:08PM (#17181595)
Good point. In civil cases the equivalent is a "settlement offer". Made famous my the RIAA. Pay us $5000/song you downloaded or we'll sue you for $5 million, and you cannot afford that. We might not win, but if we do, you're boned!
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Re:I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nigh... by retsibsi on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @11:40PM (#17184885)
> We might not win, but if we do, you're boned!

Isn't it worse than that -- more like 'we might not win, but you're probably boned either way'? I may be wrong but I have the impression that it's relatively rare to be awarded full costs, and anyway you'll have to pay your lawyers up front.

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