lystn

Nasir and Matt kick off the week by talking about Uber's deceptive tactics against Lyft. They also answer the question, "I recently incorporated in California, but when I tried to file for a DBA, my name was taken. Should I be concerned about this?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt… NASIR: And I’m Matt Staub – oh. MATT: You’re both people today. Well, I’m Matt Staub, but you can be both of us if you can emulate my voice. NASIR: And we’re both Matt Staub and welcome to the business podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: All right. Well, I’m going to jump into it and I tease this a little bit if anyone follows me on Twitter that we were going to talk about this again because one of our favorite topics – or maybe not “favorite” but one of our most talked about topics – is Uber and it looks like they’re at it again. I think this is the most interesting story we’ve talked about with them. Basically, there’s been some investigative work by Lyft. For those of you that don’t know, Uber and Lyft are both essentially taxi cab-like services, more or less. So, Uber, what they’ve been doing over the last couple of years is ordering and cancelling rides through Lyft and a lot of them have been to Uber employees that have been doing it. They say roughly 5,000 rides from Lyft have been ordered and cancelled. You would think, you know, “Why would they do this?” It’s basically just to eat up Lyft’s time so they can’t take other rides because, supposedly, if someone would be deciding between the two, I guess, if you tried to get a Lyft and it was really backed up, you would just go to Uber. I only use Uber so I don’t know but I guess I know people that use both so maybe it’s whichever one is most available. Anyways, they’ve been doing that which is obviously an issue. And then, two, Uber employees have been requesting short rides via the Lyft drivers and, more or less, have been trying to convince them to switch over to Uber. That’s just a couple of things that have been going on. NASIR: We were thinking about covering this earlier. This has been happening for a while now. There’s been a lot of stories about Uber’s very aggressive marketing tactics – both here and abroad – and, of course, there’s also the legal issues with the taxi cab industry, with whether they need to be licensed or not in particular cities, and that’s a separate issue. But one thing I noticed is that, this issue with Lyft, it’s not unique to that. Even the city of Seattle had issues with how they were marketing. They were gluing up stickers and flyers up on so-called city property and that would otherwise require a permit so they weren’t too happy about that. what I do notice, though, in most cases, especially with this whole cancelling of Lyft and so forth and trying to convince Lyft drivers to join up to Uber, they’re specifically trying to stay on the legal line of things in the sense that they’re getting right to the edge. I mean, there are laws about unfair business practices, and even dealing with competitors, but usually those unfair business practices are for protections of the consumer. Right now, it’s kind of crappy what they may be doing, but I don’t see a lot of legal liability there when it comes to it. What do you think? MATT: Yeah, and that’s what we’re going to get down to – the legal side of it. Unfortunately, you’re right. I will say one thing about Uber; they’ve really done their research – not just with this but in general – and they’ve really pushed the legal limits of what they can do and I think they even had a statement come out saying, “We recruit hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to build their own small businesses on the Uber platform where the economic opportunity for drivers is unmatched ...