This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.
In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries.
Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances.
"That ladder just happened to be placed there". "The forklift happened to be parked that way". "The room happened to have too many people in it". "The fire extinguisher happened to be expired and failed to fire" -- all illegal circumstances (in various parts of the US, based on Federal/State/Local regulations)
"They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal. Making a circumstance illegal doesn't mean it will never happen, of course, but it does mean there can be immediate repercussions and fixes for it if/when it does.
> "They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal.
I mean -- I guess, technically you can, but it's one of the most insulting things I have ever heard. What are you gonna do, sue them for not having the money to have a lawyer to defend themselves? Maybe take them to court for damages, caused by them not having money? Kafka would have a field day with this.
You wouldn't take action against the person without money. You'd do something to fix the situation, like provide them with a lawyer for free.
Note I don't necessarily think that's a good idea (really haven't thought it through), but that's how I interpreted th comment.
If I make houses without a sewer line illegal, that doesn't mean the state has to lay a sewer line, it means you the owner have to take care that you get a sewer line or you open yourself up to liability.
Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?
For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum!
I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.
Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice.
The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
Look (listen?) for the cagey answers:
"Is this Restaurant X?"
"I can help you place an order!"
"But is this Restaurant X?"
"I can take your X order when ready!"
They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
The Resturant gets paid and the customers get food. The delivery service adds value and gets paid for it. If someone doesn’t realize doordash is not the Resturant by now... who cares? As long as the restaurants reputation is not hurt... (here’s were the issues start)
To that end, if I am the Resturant, I see that I can add my own delivery service, undercut doordash by a bit, and make more money, and control my reputation by employing people who have incintives aligned with me, then great! Thanks doordash, for showing me the way.
Ah, but can I? Maybe not without forming a power group with other restaurants (or some other economic structure..?), as the cost of adding a “real employee” may be greater than the margin added by the delivery service. I need a structure that both aligns incentives between delivery service and Resturant, and is cost effective. Since restaurants weren’t already doing this, probably it has to happen at the meta-Resturant level of it can be done while preserving reputation at all. (Of course, the difficulty of it depends on the food being served, so that’s why, e.g. pizza was already being delivered.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1125#a
1125(a)(1) is pretty unambiguous in this context. If Grubhub is using a restaurant's name to "deceive as to ... the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods", that's cause for civil action.
California also has a new law explicitly addressing this issue:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
... and yes, there's an aptly-named website called https://www.grubhublawsuit.com/ describing a class-action lawsuit on this specific topic.
And no, that website isn't an infringement of Grubhub's mark if it's not likely to be confused with Grubhub's business. (It'd be a different story if Grubhub were a law firm in the business of filing class action lawsuits.)
Your linked law suit is about something entirely different to what's being discussed in this thread - that's about describing restaurants as shut when they aren't.
https://www.classlawgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/Grubhub-Cla...
You're not allowed to use trademarks to masquerade as the other party, especially if you're then trying to conduct business as if you were that other party.
Taking a step back: is there any trademark usage that you view as infringing?
Using an example from another side discussion: I hope we can agree that if you made a laptop and called it a Macbook Pro, Apple would sue the heck out of you, and they'd be in the right. Where we seem to disagree is whether it's infringement if you set up a storefront, name it "Apple Store", and exclusively sell products that you've purchased from an Apple-run Apple Store.
There's also a very large body of trademark specific law which may specifically address this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
But the food isn't being misrepresented! It is the food of the restaurant. Passing off means pretending the product is something it isn't. That isn't what is happening here at all.
You and a few others seem to be under some kind of mistaken understanding that the food is 'fake' or from a fraudulent dark kitchen not actually associated with the restaurant? That's not the case. It's the actual real food from the actual restaurant, resold.
I'm not under a mistaken understanding. I'm explicitly saying that you might not have to misrepresent the food itself: if you insert yourself as an intermediary but claim to be the underlying provider, there's potential for confusion and damage to the goodwill of the underlying provider, and that is what passing off fundamentally protects against.
I don't know if it would fly, but you asked and that's a place a case might be found.
The broader point here: it's one thing to advertise selling someone else's product. It's another to _pretend to be them_.
The service of delivery is what is being passed off.
I'm afraid I think you're mistaken.
You're allowed to use someone's trademark to factually describe the product you're selling. You don't need the owner's permission to do that.
If you're selling an actual Apple laptop, you can use the trademarks 'Apple' and the Apple logo to describe it.
If you're selling an actual Bob's Burger, you can use that trademark and logo to describe it.
Somewhere in the product description, advertising, is the word "FOR".
Lightning cable FOR Apple iPhone.
Belking trying to sell the same cable as "Apple iPhone Lightning cable" would be problematic. Leaving aside licensing issues.
The proof is in the pudding. Go to one of the websites they register for a restaurant, and see just how many references to "We are not the restaurant, but we are reselling and delivering their food". Hint: rather few.
Call the number on the website. "Hello, I can take your order for [restaurant name]!"
"Is this [restaurant]?"
"I can take your order!"
Because all of the above isn't defensible. They're not just (re) selling the restaurant's food, they are implying that they -are- the restaurant.
Behavior here becomes important. Deception and context. Why in these cases if Deliveroo/Uber/etc were comfortable with their process would they not say "This is Uber Eats, and we can take orders for [restaurant]"? This again comes back to one of those definitions of fraud, "dishonestly obtaining financial advantage (your cut of the order, inflated pricing, etc) by deception (explicitly stating or repeatedly implying that you are the restaurant)".
and other vague hand-waving answer designed to imply that you are talking to the restaurant and avoiding the answer, "No this is a call center for a delivery service".
apple-sf.com (and the various food delivery sites being discussed) pass themselves off as the restaurant. It's not clear to a casual user that the order is being processed by a 3rd party.
Uber successfully had an app taken down that helped drivers determine whether Uber had cheated them out of wages they were owed. The important thing is that unless the people of UberCheats have a lot of money and time to burn they can't really challenge Uber's actions here.
Hell, a few weeks ago Apple forced a company to change their logo of a green pear because they claimed it was infringing on the Apple logo[2].
I don't like the colour of your shirt, so I'm going to say it's objectionable. It doesn't break any laws or infringe any regulations, but I want a judge's opinion on it anyway.
See?
In the case of passing off a service you offer as begin the service of another company, there is a clear legal case to answer. And as I recall this is settled caselaw in the UK and the people pretending to be other companies are in the wrong.
It wastes the time of the defendant and the legal service, which harms society.
It imagine it's also super stressful and expensive for the defendant to go through, even when it's thrown out.
Consider: - Cutting your grass at 8am when your neighbour works nights.
- A well off person putting their child up for adoption because they don't want the hassle.
- Payday loans given to people you know won't be able to pay them off, ensuring they pay you far more than the value of the loan.
- Banks processing payments out of order to trigger overdraft fees that would otherwise not have been collected.
Your example is flawed. It's not a crime or fraud to resell a product.
It is still fraud, not merely objectionable, to resell a product while in every way possible acting as if you are not a reseller but the original producer.
Isn't that what we (should) have judges for?
I mean, if a judge blindly follows the letter of the law, we can replace him/her by a computer.
'They're being objectionable' is not a reasonable starting point. 'They're being fraudulent' would be... but they clearly aren't being fraudulent.
A pro-restaurant argument might be that these alternative websites are interfering with new and extant restaurant-customer relationships, falsely implying a restaurant-delivery co. affiliation, and that the use by the delivery co. of the restaurant trademarks exceeds nominative use. The restaurants might also argue that the distribution of food, how and under what conditions, is part of their product: a delivery company taking too long to deliver an order could harm the quality of their product.
If I created a chase-bank.com website, and allowed users to interact with their actual Chase account through it, but I took a percentage of all transactions, it would be fine?
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24931128