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Netflix Terms of Service Invalidates Your Right To Sue
New submitter ebombme writes "Netflix has decided to go the route of AT&T and others by trying to take away the rights of their users to form class action lawsuits against them. A copy of the new terms of use states 'These Terms of Use provide that all disputes between you and Netflix will be resolved by BINDING ARBITRATION. YOU AGREE TO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT to assert or defend your rights under this contract (except for matters that may be taken to small claims court). Your rights will be determined by a NEUTRAL ARBITRATOR and NOT a judge or jury and your claims cannot be brought as a class action. Please review the Arbitration Agreement below for the details regarding your agreement to arbitrate any disputes with Netflix.'"
Next question.
The values i a Netflix subscription is just too small for a normal person to engage in a lawsuit. Even a class action suit would be off little value (look at history - only lawyers get any real money out of it). The real power for the subscribers is to stop the subscription. And you do not need to sue or go to arbitration over that.
And of course, if they give bad service it is far more efficient to slashdot them over it than to sue anyway.
In the US it's common to take someones life and/or liberty because of their pursuit of happiness.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Right, because the law explicitly makes arbitration legal. (See "Federal Arbitration Act"). The courts don't want to have to deal with actually providing justice (or even injustice) to pissants like us; better to fob us off on a "neutral" arbitrator hired by the other party who can deal out injustice without bothering the judges.
So... is anyone going to provide a citation instead of just shouting that the other person is wrong?
How, as a consumer, am I to know anything about the arbitrator? I don't have a legal department to research these things. And in any case, all arbitrator are similarly situated -- they all hear a lot of cases where the plaintiff is J. Random Consumer who they'll never see again, and a few massive companies who they'll see again and again and again.
It's not that every arbitrator in the country is corrupt. It's that the process is such that the arbitrator's interests naturally favor the corporation. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of being too consumer-friendly, the corporations (who can research these things) will stop agreeing to him and he's out of a job. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of always agreeing with the corporation, most consumers won't even know about it, and those few who do find out aren't significant enough to matter.
In any case, deciding disputes is the civil courts' JOB. If they can't do it, why the heck do we even have them?
Yup...and I can't for the life of me figure out how that jives with the 7 th Amendment: "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." Seems pretty clear to me.
The Constitution is like the Bible. It's supposedly sacred and infallible, but It's not meant to be taken literally and you have to let the courts interpret it for you (in the context of their own personal interests). As time passes, more and more of it gets flat-out ignored, and eventually it will only ever be read as an academic exercise by historians.