Am I allowed to share a restaurant’s information on my blog

Question

I only eat vegetarian/vegan food at restaurants. Over the years I have been asking various restaurants if they serve vegetarian or vegan food. I have email responses from quite a few restaurants. I would like to share these responses on my blogging website so others who follow similar dietary restrictions could also use this information.

I plan to share only relevant information from email responses (hiding my personal details and person at the restaurant who is replying).

Can I share such information provided in these emails, if it is only about the restaurant and not the person who sent it?

Answer 1

Yes you may

You may share your own opinions, or the opinions of others about a restaurant, or any other topic, on your blog, on your website, or on any other forum that will allow you to publish them. You may also publish factual statements.

There are several possible issues, none of which should prevent such sharing.

Copyright

When someone writes an email s/he has a copyright on that email. Quoting the entire email or a major portion of it without permission would be a violation of copyright, unless fair use (in the US) or another exception to copyright (elsewhere) applies.

Quoting a brief, largely factual email with little or no commercial value is very likely to be held to be fair use in the US. Moreover, it is unlikely that anyone would sue in the first place over such a quote.

Also it might be argued that in sending such a statement, a person from a restaurant intended it to be published, and you have implied if not express permission to quote it.

But copyright never protects facts, only expressions. If instead of quoting you merely report the facts as given to you, there is no copyright issue. For example if you get an email from "Mike@JoesPizza.com" saying "In response to your question, we do not serve Vegan Pizza" and you post on your blog or site "Joe's Pizza says that they do not serve vegan pizza" there is no copyright issue at all.

Defamation

If you distribute a false statement of purported fact that harms someone's reputation, this can be grounds for a lawsuit. In the US at least, a statement of opinion is never valid grounds for a defamation suit.

For example if you publish a statement like:

Sally's Vegan Place does not serve real vegan food. There is meat juice in all their dishes.

The owner of Sally's might well consider that defamatory, and might sue, and you would perhaps have to prove that you had good reason to believe this to be true. Possibly safer would be:

A cook at Sally's Vegan Place wrote me that they do not serve real vegan food. There is meat juice in all their dishes, according to the cook.

However, in general, a statement that a given restaurant claims that it does or does not serve such food would not be defamatory, and there is no ground for or likelihood of a suit for publishing such info, even if it is somehow incorrect or out of date.

You might want to describe in general terms the source of your information along with any post you make.