The Virginia Business Litigation Blog
In yet another case involving alleged defamatory Yelp reviews, Hadeed Carpet Cleaning has filed a “John Doe” action in Alexandria Circuit Court, seeking to first learn the identities of the anonymous posters, then recover damages from them. Yelp is based in California but conducts substantial business in Virginia, so Hadeed served Yelp’s registered agent with a subpoena duces tecum seeking to identify the individuals who wrote the negative reviews. Yelp refused to comply.
Yelp objected to the subpoena on several grounds. It argued that serving a Virginia subpoena on its registered agent was insufficient to confer jurisdiction over a California company, that its advertising agreement with Hadeed required the parties to resolve their disputes in California, and that Hadeed did not meet constitutional requirements to compel Yelp to reveal the anonymous posters’ identities.
The court rejected these arguments, finding that Hadeed complied with Virginia Code § 8.01-407.1, which spells out what a party must do to discover the identities of anonymous posters on the Internet. The court found that service of a subpoena on the registered agent was sufficient to confer jurisdiction, but even if it wasn’t, Yelp would be subject to personal jurisdiction 
anyway due to its substantial business activities in Virginia. The forum-selection clause in Yelp’s advertising agreement was inapplicable because the dispute did not arise under that contract.
Though anonymous and even false speech are entitled to some protection under the First Amendment, they do not receive the same level of protection that truthful speech and political speech are entitled to. To obtain the identity of an anonymous Internet poster, Virginia Code § 8.01-407.1 requires the requesting party to show that the statements “may be tortious” and that the identity of the anonymous communicator “is centrally needed to advance the claim, relates to a core claim or defense, or is directly and materially relevant to that claim or defense.”