I think the core issue here is that some platforms were creating websites and phone numbers to impersonate the companies. In practice it's a man-in-the-middle attack. This is what the law seems to intend to stop.

I'm pretty sure that if I falsified a website to resell services or products on behalf of a larger company I would get slapped by a lawsuit, trademark or otherwise, but it seems that for small restaurants the government felt it needed to step up.

Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same.

This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.

Someone else has mentioned that impersonation is certainly already illegal, and the right solution would be prosecution instead of making a new law, and I agree. I'm not from CA/US so I have no idea why the legislators felt the need for a new law.

Part of this is that it’s really expensive to litigate that nuance in court because even if you believe you’re correct, a company like GrubHub can continue to do business for years and years while dragging this out through the courts. Especially because of covid, many cases like this are already backed up and GrubHub could probably be happily continuing to fleece small businesses for over half a decade.

Also, if a judge for whatever reason doesn’t agree with it, say, “if the government wanted trademarks to be enforced in this manner they’d pass a law about it, no deal” (this happens Eg. An argument that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, taking years and years to do so, is that discriminating against trans people isn’t discriminating on the basis of sex because if legislature intended it that way they’d say it more explicitly in law. Imagine how many trans people were fired for being trans while this thing was going through the courts.) then now you have to pass legislature again.

Impersonation is illegal, but GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent.

To resolve this under existing law we’d need to wait for a lawsuit to roll through the courts. The legislature passes laws all the time that are somewhat duplicative to clarify their intent. The law isn’t a normalized database, and that actually speeds things up.

>GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent

Which is obvious to anyone who can and does read text. It seems to me that CA protects businesses not from impostors, but from illiterate who cannot differentiate delivery from production and they just rush to review on completely separate review platforms (it is wrong even if delivery contracted with production beforehand, imagine an angry customer reviewing bricks from a brick factory because a reseller brought them half a trailer of bricks broken in half). I bet that when you call a number, they even introduce as “grubhub support”, not as a restaurant. Not only this law treats a symptom rather than a disease, it also allows established monopolies who first used this “loophole” to retain their status in the future.

As of the problem as a whole - restaurants with their own delivery usually have a much worse service than aggregators’. Claims that “they just take our markup” is nonsense, because in practice people do value predictability and ratings of separare delivery services, while they cannot really stick a lever into many different companies that produce nice food but their delivery guys simply suck “because it’s small place and they have to meet ends”. The alternative is not their own delivery, the real alternative is to shutdown. Pandemic changed markets and fault tolerances drastically and those who ignore these facts are unlikely to bloom in it anyway.

I don't think so? Its that you cant claim to be an agent of a company if you have no financial/contractual connection with the company. Image some sleazy guy went around town pretending to work for you. Its illegal.

I think the issues is a problem of transparency. I deliver for Postmates and I really think that most of the customers don't really understand that they might be ordering from a restaurant that isn't partnered with Postmates. The knock on effect is that often the menu isn't really correct, so the customer gets their order "wrong" and calls the restaurant to complain.

Then the law should be about making it clear status of the restaurant. Just forbidding everything seems like wide sweep action that can stifle a lot of other good/innovative business models. Not something government should do.

It is far more unpredictable to litigate based on intent and public perception.

If an app displays a phone number but doesn’t say it belongs to the restaurant, is that making the current partnership clear or unclear? It’s a question left to precedent, which means there is a chance the legislation would not have teeth.

Instead of throwing restaurant owners into that mess, the new law we have today forbids a specific set of provable behaviors.

All the law has to say is that the delivery service must note next to their restaurant advertisement that they are not affiliated with or an agent of that restaurant.

This would be a simple provable thing.

It seems like a form of passing-off, which has long been regarded as worthy of proscription.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but companies (and individuals) pass off things all the time. Shipping is perhaps the most obvious example. If I'm an eBay seller and ship something to you, once I give you a tracking number, it's mostly between you and UPS. (Unless, e.g., an item was improperly packed and UPS won't honor a claim, etc.)

"Passing off" in this context doesn't mean something being passed to another party, like a sportsball player making a pass.

Rather, it's a common law term for selling an item while misrepresenting its origin [1] - for example, if an ebay seller claims to sell real rolexes and sends out fake rolexes, they have 'passed off' the fakes as real. This can happen even in the absence of registered trademarks.

Of course, most of the historical examples are of copycat products - but the definitions used on Wikipedia sound like it might cover misrepresenting restaurant partnerships - particularly if the restaurant's reputation is besmirched by inept deliveries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off

That isn't the case with these delivery services.

If ANYTHING is wrong with your order, they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless you blow them up on the phone.

> they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless

This hasn't been my experience. Every time I've used Grubhub or Postmates and used their form to submit an issue with an order, the services have always either refunded me the issue or provided credit. I've never had to deal with the restaurant, unless I wanted something outside of money.

It's been my experience multiple times or I wouldn't have mentioned it

If you have a complaint, they just refund you right away. I think they know customers could start issuing chargebacks through the credit card company and they wouldn’t have a way to defend themselves against that.

Nope.

Even if there's no real impersonation involved, the reality is that a lot of consumers, understandably, are going to sort of lump the food as delivered as something the restaurant has responsibility for. After all, none of us have a lot of patience for companies that take the attitude of "Not our problem. This other company was responsible for that. Take it up with them."

This is especially true here as, historically, restaurants were responsible for their own delivery. To most people, these services are just something that the restaurant contracted out for and is still basically on the hook for.

> as something the restaurant has responsibility for

Exactly. It's not unreasonable for customers to make the assumption that a restaurant has entered into an explicit contract with a delivery service, the same way we hold them accountable for the ingredients they select. It's a very different mindset from something like postal delivery from FedEx or UPS, where we are more likely to treat each party as separate entities.

Not if you're using X branding to market the pizza to Y.

Especially, not if the pizza being resold doesn't live up to X quality standards because it got cold.

Try reselling from any major fast food restaurant, they'll stop selling to you, and if you paid different people to do the pickup, I bet you would get sued.

Is that true? I've never used any of these services but, around where I live, I'd say most of the listed restaurants are national fast food chains. Of course, these companies may well have agreements will all of them.

I believe every country has laws against distributing food if you don't have some sort of approval from some sort of health and safety department.

If you do it once, nobody is going to care, but if you try and make a business out of other people's food, you'd best be compliant.

They have, but not if they pretend to be X or to be somehow contracted by X to do deliveries if that is not actually the case.

If everyone behaves then there is no problem with this setup, however if the middleman is improperly suggesting that y is buying directly from X when they are taking a cut then perhaps a reasonable solution is to ban middlemen altogether.

It's a good question. There's two parts to it, whether the law allows for that, and whether or not the law should allow for it?

There are certainly some classes of items/products/services that allow X to legally bar Y from selling it to Z: airline tickets, sub-leasing apartments, software etc.

If a person decides to open their home kitchen and sell food to the general public, don't they have a right to?

If they get a license first. As long as the license process is reasonable and non-discriminatory, what's the issue?

absolutely; but they can't pretend to be X at all