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Nasir and Mattrelive their top moments from 2014. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Happy New Year! Welcome to our Best of 2014 episode of Legally Sound Smart Business! Welcome to our show! My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. I guess you didn’t need me to be here. You could have done this by yourself but it’s all right. Thanks for having me. NASIR: Actually, I didn’t even know you were here. That’s really weird. So, yeah, so we’ve had a huge year; a lot of legal issues that we covered. I think Matthew, our audio producer, has a nice surprise for you guys to put together a few nice little clips for this Best of 2014 episode. MATT: Yeah, it should be a good one. I’m not sure right now as we’re recording what those “best of” are going to be but, really, all of them are good in my opinion so you can’t really go wrong. NASIR: Well, what’s interesting is the actual Best of 2014 is just going to be one long audio file of all the episodes put together. It’s going to be like a 20- or 30-hour episode but probably more than that. MATT: Yeah, it’d be more than that, I would think. I don’t think you could have a podcast file that large. NASIR: Well, enjoy your week of listening and we’ll be back in a few days. MATT: Yeah. Keep it sound and keep it smart. [PARTY HORN] MATT: Let’s get right into it this week. There’s a story that came out. It’s going to be very interesting what happens with this and it’s going to be good news for some business owners. NASIR: Yeah, I think it’s huge. MATT: Yeah, and I can’t remember anything like this happening before. It was a lawsuit involving Yelp. It was in Virginia. There’s a company that had all these negative reviews and I believe they’re also anonymous reviews so the people didn’t say who they were and, essentially, there was a lawsuit that happened and Yelp was required to turn over the information of those so-called anonymous reviews which, like I said, this is going to be a big precedent. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. This was in Virginia but it will be really interesting to see what happens in other states and, just, if anything follows up with an appeal. NASIR: This is where you have anonymous reviewers that are posting information about your business that not only is false but is suspected to be completely your competitors or something. MATT: Right. NASIR: This is a carpet cleaning business and they think that this is a competitor that is going on this website and posting these bad reviews about them. Keep in mind, people that are listening though, this is a Virginia lawsuit. This was a public court decision. MATT: Yeah, this was done by the Court of Appeals. NASIR: So, to understand what that means, unless you’re in the state of Virginia, that is not going to apply to you, but it is going to be persuasive authority in the sense that it could be used to help your argument in your respective state. And, also, keep in mind, I noticed that the basis of their lawsuit was a statute that was passed in Virginia which there are other states that have a similar statute which talks about basically anonymous posting and, if there’s a tortious or illegal communication, then the burden of proof going through First Amendment rights and so forth is lessened if it’s an anonymous post online. So, even if your case is similar but if you’re not in a state that has a similar statute, it may not even work. MATT: All right, let’s get into the first question this week, and this comes from a start-up in New York City. “I was in a start-up competition where random teams were assembled. We didn’t win but still wanted to move forward. How do we determine who owns what?” I’m assuming they are talking about ownership of the entity – well, I guess they don’t have an entity yet – of the business of whatever they put together. NASIR: Well, probably not, right? They misspelled the word “forward” so I’m sure they didn’t think about that as well.