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ISP Sued Over Suspended Email Account
Saint Aardvark writes "A Canadian woman is suing her former ISP over their suspension of her email account. Their accounting system screwed up, and they suspended her account while they sought payment from her. What she didn't realize was that email sent to that address continued to pile up, without any notification to the sender that she had no access to it. She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this. Read the article at CNet, the complaint she brought to the Canadian Privacy Commisioner, and further details from the woman herself on Cryptome.org."
No, it isn't reasonable. But that's not what happened here. She continued to pay her bill. They screwed up. Jesus, jsut read that article.
No. Just because something is in a contract doesn't make it legal. Happens all the time. You can sign a contract agreeing to kill someone, but obviously, that contract is null and void. Those trucks with the stickers plastered on back that say "not responsible for broken windshields"... they're responsible.
In this case, a judge is gonna say that the spirit of the contract was for x amount of Net service over x period of time. A lawyer obviously didn't even look at the ISP's contract before they started using it.
I can't believe, what, three-quarters? of the posts on here are people going "OH WELL SHE SHOULD HAVE PAID THEN DUH".
The accounting system screwed up, ok? She was already paid up and they wanted more money.
Now, the ISP terms said they wouldn't guarantee error-or-interruption-free service. BUT...this isn't covered under that. It was an accounting error, and they suspended her account. This is not the same as if, say, their DNS servers borked.
I'd say she deserves compensation. Definitely. I have had my share of burns from ISP's with OUTRIGHT SHODDY accounting and business practices. Fortunately, nothing so serious...yet. About the only problem was paying THREE TIMES at their suggestion because they said the transaction didn't go through....and then receiving a bill for all three charges. That was an immediate cancel, and lucky for them they credited back the amount.
I hope she wins the case, I'd like to see some of these ISP's get a little more professional. It is a business after all, not a geek club.
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Check out his film while you're at it...
No, it is.
As I said, Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Ex. 341 (1854) is basically the seminal holding on the subject. The plaintiffs had a mill in Gloucester. A crankshaft broke, and in order to get a new one, the millers had to ship the old one back to the engineers in Greenwich so that they could copy it in making the replacement.
The plaintiffs gave the crankshaft to the defendants, who were couriers. They said that it needed to be sent immediately. However, there was a mix-up and it wound up being rather late, obviously reducing the profit of the plaintiffs, since their mill was totally out of commission during this time.
BUT the defendants only had to pay damages as to the speed of the shipping, and not as to the lost profits. This is because while it was obvious to them that they needed to be fast because that's what the customer insisted on, it wasn't obvious WHY. There was no way that they could have known the full extent of the damages that would result, nor is it commonplace for couriers to know that if they are late delivering _a_ package that someone will lose a fortune as a consequence. That's only true with regards to certain _specific_ packages, or a business that _mostly_ carries critically important packages, such as organ couriers.
The case is even more clear cut here. While people _do_ conduct business over email, a very large quantity of email is spam or personal mail that does not harm people if there is a problem with the non-performing party to the service contract.
Unless the ISP was specifically informed that this PARTICULAR email was of the gravest importance BECAUSE it was worth many thousands of dollars, then they should be able to treat it as though it is any generic email and not worth special care. After all, how could they have possibly known? Are they mind-readers? No. It's unfair to punish them for something that's unforeseen.
If we adopted such a rule, then the possible liabilities of entering into a contract would be so high that we would discourage people from ever so doing, or from doing so affordably in the general case. This is because the party subject to the liability has to predict uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable matters, such as the liklihood of outages caused by someone in a different country running a backhoe through a major fiber line, DDOSes, email viruses, etc.
Since we would rather have lots of transactions occur, we default to the general case, and do not make parties subject to unusually high liabilities unless they are specifically forewarned of them, and can opt not to enter into a contract such as that, knowing the risk they're being asked to take.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.