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Comment by ed312 | Hacker News Reader

Do businesses have any recourse here? E.g. for the pizza situation - can a business ban DoorDash and its ilk?

In-N-Out has done this: https://www.foodandwine.com/news/n-out-doesnt-want-anyone-de...

I enjoy that In-N-Out is still proceeding with the suit even though DoorDash has taken down the advertising in question. Have to send a message.

It's an interesting question. I suspect there's some trademark arguments to be made regarding confusion as to who is providing the product and service and whose failures any mistakes reflect. That kind of attribution, and the product quality it promotes, is one of the central purposes of trademark law. But there's also the first sale doctrine--that after you sell your physical product, people can do with it as they please, including resell. I suspect it comes down to how clear Doordash makes it that the restaurant is not involved in the service, but I'm not an expert in these areas, and this is obviously not legal advice.

All the regulation around food and beverage sales stands to the contrary - Normal people can't resell liquor, nor resell takeout food from a licensed restaurant.

Relatedly, it's surprising that delivery times aren't monitored because of (totally appropriate!) food safety laws on holding food at proper temperature

> Normal people can't resell liquor, nor resell takeout food from a licensed restaurant

That's actually good and a bit surprising. I find it quite disingenuous that DoorDash lists restaurants that haven't agreed to do take-out or delivery. Not only that by having a call center call into a restaurant it's just making the experience more expensive.

There is one restaurant in SF that was going to push for legal action. https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...

Those prohibitions have nothing to do with the original seller asserting his copyright or trademarks or patents, which is what the first sale doctrine prevents. They're just requirements for anyone who is selling food to the public.

The safety angle is interesting.

But doctrine of first sale does not extend to you fraudulently masquerading as the first-party seller.

> But there's also the first sale doctrine--that after you sell your physical product, people can do with it as they please, including resell.

Yep! First sale doctrine applies to all transactions. This is why my gammy can resell her Oxy’s and it’s all nice and legal.

To speak more precisely, the first sale doctrines prevent the original seller from asserting intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, trademark) as a basis to prohibit resell. I was writing an internet comment, not a legal brief!

So then first sale has nothing to do with Doordash’s food delivery service right?

It's an obstacle to suing Doordash for trademark infringement, which is what you would typically do when someone is doing business in your name without your permission.

If delivery people are paying with the Doordash debit card (most likely for non-partnered restaurants) you might be able to ban that BIN number (YMMV but it is possible with Stripe Radar + Stripe Terminal), or you could instruct your cashiers to refuse service to doordash drivers based on what card they use. After DoorDash receives enough reports from their drivers/customers it'd probably be delisted.

This would be key for restaurants to do, in DoorDash’s largest markets.

It probably can't since people don't have to be honest about being DoorDash.

But how can DoorDash advertise and impersonate someone else's restaurant without their consent?

https://www.google.com/search?q=in+n+out+doordash+lawsuit

The pizza business is the one making the profit here, at doordash's expense.

It'd presumably be trivial for doordash to fix this, by checking the order amount against the cost. The article explains why they might not be doing that ("growth")

The problem is some customers received the pizza cold, and instead of blaming DoorDash, they blamed the restaurant. It's very misleading when DoorDash resell a product and pretend like the restaurant is actively participating in that process. I personally would not hesitate to ramp up the "self ordering", just to f* with DoorDash.

Gotcha. You're talking about doordash pretending to be the restaurant, not the arbitrage problem.

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