Copyright Need Yelp's Permission to Write an Unofficial Restaurant Guide from their Reviews?

[dustin563]

I'm considering writing an unofficial guide to South Bay restaurants, excerpting many short quotes from various users on Yelp. Would this fall under "fair use"? Or would I need permission from Yelp?

Also, who owns the rights to the posts on Yelp? Does Yelp own them? Or do the individual users on Yelp who wrote each review own them?

 

[Michael Wechsler]

1. Look at Yelp's terms of use to see who owns the rights to their posts. It's either the poster, Yelp or some combination of both with licenses.

2. Would short excerpts fall under fair use? I would tend to think so but this is a large gray area so I won't say for sure yes or no. The shorter the better. You could probably say, e.g. "A user on the popular Yelp website said that "the Japanese food was so yummy I ate there 50 times last week!" A full paragraph or two might be pushing things too far. Also consider the number of quotes you'll use. If it's 8 in a good sized book, that might not be too much. But if every other review has Yelp quotes, expect to hear from them. With my accreditation, I mention this from the practical experience dealing with the business issues (high importance) in having policed copyrighted property. If we received reasonable accreditation then the minimal possible infringement wasn't an issue. Can't speak for everyone.

3. Do you need permission from Yelp? See #2. The less you use the more likely you may have a fair use claim and less likely Yelp will think any lawsuit is worthwhile. If you want to obtain their rights to use the quotes, be prepared to provide them with some compensation in some fashion and I'm guessing it may be more than you might care to provide. You can always try but then you'd be alerting them to something that they might want to police more strongly.

Just some thoughts. If you're thinking of using many of Yelp's reviews... then you really want to be careful. Good luck.

 

[FLLegalEagle]

Why not take the time to read Yelp's Terms of service rather than just post a lame answer that isn't very informative and that is arguably wrong? Yelp clearly states that the reviewers own the content, and that by using Yelp you grant rights to just about everyone to use it in any way they want. Yelp only owns the format and the aggregates, such as a venues average rating. So if you wanted to write a book, you could obtain permission from the individual users, or simply use them with the expectation that nobody is going to sue you for using something that they virtually put into the public domain anyway. You could certainly use snippets (I assume you mean the way Zagat cobbles their reviews together). As with Yelp, your book is a summary of many reviews; no one reviewer could claim that their review was the reason people bought your book.