Billion Dollar Bully

Last updated
Billion Dollar Bully
"Billion Dollar Bully" movie poster.jpeg
Directed byKaylie Milliken
Produced byKaylie Milliken
Mellissa Wood
CinematographyJon Ingalls
Edited bySteven Sandhu
Music bySteve Barkwill
Production
company
Prost Productions
Distributed byVirgil Films [1]
Release date
  • May 21, 2019 (2019-05-21)
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Billion Dollar Bully is a documentary film about Yelp and its alleged business practices. The film was directed by Kaylie Milliken and produced by Prost Productions. [2] [3] The film was released on May 21, 2019. [4]

Contents

Production background

Milliken said that she decided to take on the project when her doctor told her that she had begun seeing negative Yelp reviews for her practice that she was unable to reconcile with actual patient visits, and that she had become convinced that some of the reviews were fictitious when a complaint was posted describing symptoms she had never seen in her practice. [5]

Business Insider reported that on the day following the film's initial press release and Kickstarter campaign, Yelp stock declined by 4% in afternoon trading. [6]

The Hollywood Reporter announced on August 12, 2015, that public relations specialist Michael Levine, would become the executive producer for Billion Dollar Bully. Levine has represented 58 Academy Award winners, most notably including Charlton Heston. The film has an unspecified budget, and some backers were requesting that they remain unnamed. [7]

Yelp response

An unnamed spokesperson for Yelp, commented to Business Insider , "The director has a conflict of interest, as she has a history of trying to mislead consumers on Yelp. There is no merit to the claims they appear to highlight, which have been repeatedly dismissed by courts of law, investigated by government regulators, including the FTC, [8] and disproven by academic study." [6] Milliken, however, has since responded to Yelp's allegations, citing the fact that the reviews in question had appeared before she and her husband were married and that repeated reviews were submitted due to a misunderstanding. [9]

In Levitt v. Yelp! Inc. (2011), Judge Edward Chen, found that removal of positive reviews, or re-ordering of reviews, fell within the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act's "traditional editorial functions." Additionally, the firm's motive and ethical underpinnings are irrelevant under Section 230's editorializing allowance. Judge Chen concluded: "The Ninth Circuit has made it clear that the need to defend against a proliferation of lawsuits, regardless of whether the provider ultimately prevails, undermines the purpose of section 230." [10]

This judgment was appealed, and in 2014 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that businesses do not have a pre-existing right to have positive reviews, and that "threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay" therefore was not extortion under California law. In its primary ruling, the court held that, "We conclude, first, that Yelp’s manipulation of user reviews was not wrongful use of economic fear, and, second, that the business owners pled insufficient facts to make out a plausible claim that Yelp authored negative reviews of their businesses. Accordingly, we agree with the district court that these allegations do not support a claim for extortion." [11] (p. 12) Secondarily, "In sum, to state a claim of economic extortion under both federal and California law, a litigant must demonstrate either that he had a pre-existing right to be free from the threatened harm, or that the defendant had no right to seek payment for the service offered. Any less stringent standard would transform a wide variety of legally acceptable business dealings into extortion." [11] (p. 18)

Eric Goldman, writing for Forbes Magazine , explains that extortion by economic threat is a narrow construct and that this ruling only addresses extortion. [12] Other 2014 pending cases against Yelp included false advertisement, [13] and securities fraud. [14]

After the Federal Trade Commission revealed a number of complaints, shareholders are taking Yelp to court, claiming Yelp artificially inflated the price of stock for its executive's benefit.

The Class Action lawsuit, [15] being led by investor Joseph Curry, focuses on Yelp's "first-hand" reviews. The suit says Yelp required businesses "to pay to suppress negative reviews," and then lied about the practice.

Crowdfunding campaigns

Billion Dollar Bully surpassed its initial Kickstarter funding goal of $60,000 by 150%. [16] Subsequent campaigns were held during the production phase, including an Indiegogo campaign. [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federal Trade Commission</span> United States government agency

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust law enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. The agency is headquartered in the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, DC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Goldman Sachs</span> American investment bank

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many international financial centers. Goldman Sachs is the second largest investment bank in the world by revenue and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In Forbes Global 2000 2023 Goldman Sachs ranked 34th. It is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Testimonial</span> Statement extolling the virtue of a product or person

In promotion and advertising, a testimonial or show consists of a person's written or spoken statement extolling the virtue of a product. The term "testimonial" most commonly applies to the sales-pitches attributed to ordinary citizens, whereas the word "endorsement" usually applies to pitches by celebrities. Testimonials can be part of communal marketing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brown & Williamson</span> American tobacco company

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation was a U.S. tobacco company and a subsidiary of multinational British American Tobacco that produced several popular cigarette brands. It became infamous as the focus of investigations for chemically enhancing the addictiveness of cigarettes. Its former vice-president of research and development, Jeffrey Wigand, was the whistleblower in an investigation conducted by CBS news program 60 Minutes, an event that was dramatized in the film The Insider (1999). Wigand claimed that B&W had introduced chemicals such as ammonia into cigarettes to increase nicotine delivery and increase addictiveness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Levchin</span> Ukrainian-born American software engineer

Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.

POM Wonderful, LLC is a private company which sells an eponymous brand of beverages and fruit extracts. It was founded in 2002 by the billionaire industrial agriculture couple Stewart and Lynda Rae Resnick. Through The Wonderful Company, their holding company, they are also affiliated with Teleflora, FIJI Water, pesticide manufacturer Suterra, and Paramount Agribusiness. In 2010, the company was warned by the FDA for making false health claims and for marketing statements that promoted their products as unauthorized drugs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yelp</span> Directory service and online review forum

Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kickstarter</span> US-based crowdfunding platform

Kickstarter, PBC is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of February 2023, Kickstarter has received US$7 billion in pledges from 21.7 million backers to fund 233,626 projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, board games, technology, publishing, and food-related projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMICS Publishing Group</span> Discredited academic publishing company

OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, and Life Science Events.

SoFi Technologies, Inc. is an American online personal finance company and online bank. Based in San Francisco, SoFi provides financial products including student loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, credit card, investing, and banking through both mobile app and desktop interfaces.

Scott E. Yancey is a TV personality, businessman, real estate investor, and author. He is best known for his role on the A&E television series, Flipping Vegas, a modern reality TV show in which Scott and his wife, Amie Yancey purchase and repair dilapidated homes in the Las Vegas Valley, and attempt to flip them for profit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Chiasson</span> American hedge fund manager

Anthony R. Chiasson is an American hedge fund manager and co-founder of Level Global Investors LP, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based hedge fund management firm. Level Global was launched in 2003 with about $500 million in assets under management, and grew to $4.2 billion in assets and 75 employees before closing in early 2011.

Google has been involved in multiple lawsuits over issues such as privacy, advertising, intellectual property and various Google services such as Google Books and YouTube. The company's legal department expanded from one to nearly 100 lawyers in the first five years of business, and by 2014 had grown to around 400 lawyers. Google's Chief Legal Officer is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development David Drummond.

Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.

Hassell v. Bird was a case heard within the California court system related to a court-ordered removal of a defamatory user review of a law firm from the Yelp website. The case, first heard in the California Court of Appeals, First District, Division Four, unanimously ruled in favor of the law firm, ordering Yelp to remove the review in 2016. Yelp refused to remove the review and appealed the decision. In July 2018, the California Supreme Court reversed the order in a closely divided 4-3 decision, stating that Yelp's position fell within Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a publisher of user material, and was not required to comply with the trial court's removal order. However, the part of the trial court's decision that ordered the reviewer to remove the defamatory review and pay a monetary judgement were left intact. The Supreme Court of the United States denied to hear the appeal, leaving the California Supreme Court's decision.

Robert "Bo" Muller-Moore is a silk screen artist based in Montpelier, Vermont, known for a legal dispute with fast food company Chick-fil-A.

Christina Lewis Halpern is an American social entrepreneur and journalist. She has founded two organizations: All Star Code, a non-profit education organization that attracts, prepares, and places young men of color in the branch of technology, and Give Blck, a comprehensive database of Black-founded non-profit organizations.

World Patent Marketing (WPM), founded in 2014 by Scott G. Cooper was a fraudulent Miami-based corporation that presented itself as an invention-promotion firm but was later determined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to defraud investors seeking to market inventions. In March 2018, following an FTC investigation, World Patent Marketing was shut down and Cooper was banned from the patent industry and ordered to pay nearly $1 million in FTC fines.

AMG Capital Management, LLC v. Federal Trade Commission, 593 U.S. ___ (2021), was a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with the ability of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to seek monetary relief for restitution or disgorgement from those that it found in violation of trade practices. The Court ruled unanimously that the FTC had misused its authority granted by the Federal Trade Commission Act under Section 13(b) to obtain monetary relief.

References

  1. ↑ Productions, Prost. "Highly anticipated Yelp documentary BILLION DOLLAR BULLY is acquired by Virgil Films" (Press release). Retrieved 2019-06-19.
  2. ↑ Tiffany Wilson, ABC7 News (March 20, 2015)
  3. ↑ "Yelp falls after plans for critical documentary announced". The Fly. 19 March 2015. Archived from the original on 14 April 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2015. According to the film's Director/producer Kaylie Milliken, "business owners from across a broad spectrum who have stepped up and agreed to tell their personal stories of Yelp's questionable business dealings, all of which are vehemently denied by Yelp." Yelp shares slid 2% to $45.88 in early trading this morning after Prost Productions issued a press release about the film last night.
  4. ↑ "The News We've Been Waiting to Deliver!". 2 April 2019.
  5. ↑ ZARA, CHRISTOPHER (11 March 2015). "Filmmaker interviews businesses who say Yelp blackmailed them". Business Insider . Archived from the original on 14 April 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2015. Kaylie Milliken: I was at a doctor about a year ago, and she started telling me about her experiences with Yelp. The more she talked about it, the more my jaw just kind of dropped. I knew that they had aggressive sales people -- my husband is a small-business owner and he's complained before about how pushy they can be. But then she started telling me about receiving reviews, really negative reviews by clients, and she couldn't figure out who these clients were.
  6. 1 2 UDLAND, MYLES (19 March 2015). "Yelp shares are getting whacked and traders are pointing to this documentary project on Kickstarter". Business Insider . Archived from the original on 14 April 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2015. Yelp shares were down as much as 4% in afternoon trade on Thursday, and traders are pointing to this Kickstarter project seeking to fund a documentary showing alleged abuses by the customer review service.
  7. ↑ Bond, Paul (12 August 2015). "Yelp Accused of Mob-Like Behavior in Upcoming Documentary". The Hollywood Reporter . Archived from the original on 14 August 2015. Retrieved 14 August 2015.
  8. ↑ FTC Document - 5,392 Complaints against Yelp / Extortion / Libel / Unfair Business ... https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/how-many-ftc-complaints-against-yelp-as-of-july-2016-26665/#file-103928
  9. ↑ "An Exclusive Look at 'Billion Dollar Bully', a Film About Yelp". 21 July 2016.
  10. ↑ Neuburger, Jeff (10 November 2011). "Service Provider's Intent in Removing Positive Reviews Irrelevant in Assessing Availability of CDA Section 230 Protection". Proskauer Rose LLP. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015. Retrieved 15 April 2015.
  11. 1 2 Levitt v. Yelp! Inc., 765 F.3d 1123 (9th Cir. 2014)
  12. ↑ Goldman, Eric (3 September 2014). "Court Says Yelp Doesn't Extort Businesses". Forbes Magazine . Retrieved 27 August 2015.
  13. ↑ Goldman, Eric (30 July 2014). "Does Yelp Have The 'Most Trusted Reviews'? A Court Wants To Know More". Forbes Magazine . Retrieved 27 August 2015.
  14. ↑ PRESS RELEASE (6 August 2014). "Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP Files Class Action Suit against Yelp Inc". The Wall St. Journal. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
  15. ↑ Federal Trade Commission class action lawsuit
  16. ↑ Crum, Chris (27 March 2015). "Yelp Documentary 'Billion Dollar Bully' Reaches Funding Goal". WebProNews. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015. Retrieved 15 April 2015.
  17. ↑ "Billion Dollar Bully".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.