Legal Niches

Belkin admits that fake positive reviews of its products were solicited by one of its employees.  Apparently, in an effort to artificially boost Belkin's status on Amazon, Belkin business development representative Mark Bayard used the Mechanical Turk service "to ask users to write postive reviews of a Belkin product at a rate of 65 cents per review.  The requests made it clear that writers need have no experience of, nor even own, the product in question. Mechanical Turk is an online clearing-house for small jobs that cannot be done by machine, such as writing product descriptions."

E-Commerce Law Briefs is a weekly feature appearing each Friday afternoon on E-Commerce Law. Each week, E-Commerce Law Briefs will provide a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.