If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?
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.
This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This would be a simple provable thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 they get a license first. As long as the license process is reasonable and non-discriminatory, what's the issue?