You write as if the suit has a chance. The suit has no chance, none, zilch, zero. They were not forced to write the reviews. Imagine me and you suing ycombinator, because our post on HN adds value to the site. How absurd.
I certainly hope you are correct (and would believe you to be), I just have zero domain knowledge of the law in this scenario and wanted to resist making such an assertion.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this. What a breath of fresh air! Zero domain knowledge doesn't prevent most HN users from just making something up on the spot and spewing it as fact.
You are joking but it's not a stretch for YC to in some way compensate high karma users who post on a continual basis.
I don't know what that compensation should be and I know it goes against the grain of the way things work everywhere and that people participate voluntarily (and derive their own benefit from it) but a token of thanks (of the monetary form) would be a good idea.
(And I'm not suggesting that someone with my karma level qualifies.)
Your idea is supposed to be that being "forced" to do things is what makes someone an employee, but no employee is ever forced to do anything---all employees have the option of leaving their employers in the very same way that yelp reviewers are able to leave. I agree that something is wrong here, but I don't think that you're correct about what that thing is.
Agree that (from what I read) the "suit" has no chance.
But the job of a good attorney is to find a leg to stand on.
An attorney has taken the case.
A leg to stand on has been presented. From a quick (I mean literally quick) scan it appears that Yelp pulled one of the parties "Elite" status as an example.
The action here appears to present a case to get benefit out of Yelp for their arbitrary actions against the complainant. A case does not have to be winnable in order to derive benefit (note what patent trolls do that has everyone up in arms).
While the people here are not employees there is something wrong going on in a community (HN falls into this category) where people put in time and effort and then "privileges" are pulled without recourse, appeal or clear lines drawn.
"And he may just be doing it to get free publicity."
A really good point and I actually meant to mention that as a reason the case might have been accepted.
But that said even though I am generally a believer that any publicity is good as an attorney you wouldn't want to come off as a total laughing stock in order to get publicity. So while we definitely don't know if he is a "good attorney" we do know that he was able to get an attorney to take the case. I wasn't able to find much on the attorney. So he has (quick guess) everything to gain and not much to lose.
Of course I could offer as a counter to my argument the facebook case (Paul Ceglia) [1] [2] which was a total joke but he managed to get a prominent law firm to represent him in that case and they certainly screwed up on that one.