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.
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.