Question wrote:
I doubt you could sue a review site, otherwise all the big companies would be sueing every big review site …
Where do you get that idea? You’ve clearly forgotten the case from several years ago when the owner of a Sydney restaurant successfully sued the author of a review in the SMH that said his lobster was “inedible” or something like that, which the court regarded as a statement of fact rather than opinion.
Or, more recently, how about this story from the USA? Or this one, closer to home.
The reason big companies don’t sue big websites for negative reviews may be that there could be no net gain, they will probably look like bullies and it just extends the life and reach of the original complaint.
But we’re not talking about big websites and big companies. We are discussing fledgling websites that could see their entire working capital tied up in a law suit brought by an entity they have rightly or wrongly criticised.
There is no right to free speech in Australia, at least not enshrined in our constitution. And that means a negative review is subject to potential challenge in the courts with each case decided on its merits.
It would not be up to the defamed company to prove the claims were false – it would be up to the review website to prove they were true and were not motivated by malice as well as being in the public interest.
That’s a pretty high bar to reach … and probably explains why there isn’t any such website operating on a significant scale in Australia right now.