Post by High Priestess on Jun 13, 2016 15:24:45 GMT
SEe the article:
www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Legal-challenges-could-upend-San-Francisco-s-8051062.php
Can companies be compelled to police their own customers?
That question is at the heart of San Francisco’s latest attempt to regulate vacation rentals in private homes. Last week, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to mandate that Airbnb, HomeAway/VRBO, FlipKey and other vacation-rental marketplaces vet listings to make sure hosts are registered with the city — or face steep fines and misdemeanor penalties.
The new rule is no different than requiring car-rental companies to verify that customers have driver’s licenses, said Supervisor David Campos, a longtime Airbnb critic who spearheaded what he calls “commonsense changes” with Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
But Airbnb host Keith Freedman (keith, a member on this forum) had a different analogy. If crime increases in a neighborhood, “I want more police there, not a law that local businesses have to install cameras and hire their own security,” said Freedman, the policy chairman of the Home Sharers Democratic Club, which represents vacation hosts. “Cities should enforce their own laws.”
Legal experts said San Francisco’s latest ordinance pertaining to short term rentals could get tripped up by a federal law that shields Internet companies from liability for content on their sites, namely Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Some have called the act “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
“Section 230 immunizes a platform for any types of defects or omissions in content provided by third parties,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Campos said he kept the federal statute in mind when crafting the law and that he thinks it will withstand legal challenges. Internet companies that simply publish listings, such as Craigslist, would in fact be shielded by the act. However, companies such as Airbnb that engage in short-term rentals as their primary business, would not.
“Content has nothing to do with it,” he said. “We’re talking about regulating the conduct these platforms engage in to participate in this business. If a company enters the short-term rental business, we have every right to expect and require certain conduct.”
Greene said that point is in dispute. Companies that handle payment processing may or may not be covered by the federal law. (Airbnb handles all payments on its site; HomeAway handles about a third of payments for its hosts; and FlipKey said it handles payments for the majority of its hosts.) StubHub and eBay successfully used Section 230 as a defense in court against restrictions on some of their transactions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stood behind Visa and MasterCard when they faced legal challenges for processing donations to WikiLeaks, he said.
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said there are two other legal doctrines in addition to Section 230 that could trip up San Francisco’s law.
One is the First Amendment. Companies that list vacation rentals on their sites “are structurally just publishing other people’s content, so we have all the rules that apply to free speech,” he said. “In cases like this, it would be treated as dissemination of advertising, which is subject to lower First Amendment scrutiny, but still protected.”
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I tend to think that San Francisco has no legs to stand on legally, as regards this attempt to have Airbnb police all its listings. If they were responsible for the legality of all their listings, this would prove extremely burdensome, in a landscape with not only thousands upon thousands of differing laws around the world, but also many areas where the law is unclear -- even to attorneys in those regions. I just can't see that US law would uphold the SF law.
www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Legal-challenges-could-upend-San-Francisco-s-8051062.php
Can companies be compelled to police their own customers?
That question is at the heart of San Francisco’s latest attempt to regulate vacation rentals in private homes. Last week, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to mandate that Airbnb, HomeAway/VRBO, FlipKey and other vacation-rental marketplaces vet listings to make sure hosts are registered with the city — or face steep fines and misdemeanor penalties.
The new rule is no different than requiring car-rental companies to verify that customers have driver’s licenses, said Supervisor David Campos, a longtime Airbnb critic who spearheaded what he calls “commonsense changes” with Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
But Airbnb host Keith Freedman (keith, a member on this forum) had a different analogy. If crime increases in a neighborhood, “I want more police there, not a law that local businesses have to install cameras and hire their own security,” said Freedman, the policy chairman of the Home Sharers Democratic Club, which represents vacation hosts. “Cities should enforce their own laws.”
Legal experts said San Francisco’s latest ordinance pertaining to short term rentals could get tripped up by a federal law that shields Internet companies from liability for content on their sites, namely Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Some have called the act “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
“Section 230 immunizes a platform for any types of defects or omissions in content provided by third parties,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Campos said he kept the federal statute in mind when crafting the law and that he thinks it will withstand legal challenges. Internet companies that simply publish listings, such as Craigslist, would in fact be shielded by the act. However, companies such as Airbnb that engage in short-term rentals as their primary business, would not.
“Content has nothing to do with it,” he said. “We’re talking about regulating the conduct these platforms engage in to participate in this business. If a company enters the short-term rental business, we have every right to expect and require certain conduct.”
Greene said that point is in dispute. Companies that handle payment processing may or may not be covered by the federal law. (Airbnb handles all payments on its site; HomeAway handles about a third of payments for its hosts; and FlipKey said it handles payments for the majority of its hosts.) StubHub and eBay successfully used Section 230 as a defense in court against restrictions on some of their transactions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stood behind Visa and MasterCard when they faced legal challenges for processing donations to WikiLeaks, he said.
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said there are two other legal doctrines in addition to Section 230 that could trip up San Francisco’s law.
One is the First Amendment. Companies that list vacation rentals on their sites “are structurally just publishing other people’s content, so we have all the rules that apply to free speech,” he said. “In cases like this, it would be treated as dissemination of advertising, which is subject to lower First Amendment scrutiny, but still protected.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I tend to think that San Francisco has no legs to stand on legally, as regards this attempt to have Airbnb police all its listings. If they were responsible for the legality of all their listings, this would prove extremely burdensome, in a landscape with not only thousands upon thousands of differing laws around the world, but also many areas where the law is unclear -- even to attorneys in those regions. I just can't see that US law would uphold the SF law.
