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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.
That's the real problem. The only winner in these class actions is the lawyers. They get $20M. The consumers get coupons and the service raises their price to collect the $20M and give it the lawyers.
I got a check for $0.02 in a mortgage case when the class action lawyer took home $65M. Funny how the account servicing fee went up $0.10 a month after that. Probably cost me over $20 to recover that $0.02 I had been "cheated" out of.
Completely enforceable in the US.
US Supreme Court ruled that binding arbitration agreements are legal and enforceable.
Still, not news, as every company will soon have this clause.
The values i a Netflix subscription is just too small for a normal person to engage in a lawsuit.
What if Netflix leaked your private information, including credit card, and decided to hide the fact for months until you are the victim of identity theft that takes years of aggravation to clean up? Is that enough value to seek a legal remedy?
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?
This blog discusses the case and its ramifications briefly
Significance: Under this Supreme Court ruling, consumer contracts that require binding arbitration and prohibit participation in classwide arbitration are allowable.
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/banking/2011/05/us-supreme-court-okays-binding-arbitration-clauses-prohibiting-consumers-from-joining-class-actions.html
The AT&T case was unique in that the SCOTUS overrode a CA statute that was OVERLY generous to consumers (and completely unfair to businesses) and said the arbitration clause was valid. MA on the other hand will toss out such a clause (as they did in the Dell case) as it simply stripped a consumer's right to the court. So I repeat, the AT&T does NOT validate all arbitration clauses, all it did was invalidate enforcement of a CA statute that was superceded by the Fed Arbitration Action.
"Where is my mind?"
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.