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Court Rules Website Terms of Service Agreement Completely Invalid
another random user sends this excerpt from Business Insider:
"In January, hackers got hold of 24 million Zappos customers' email addresses and other personal information. Some of those customers have been suing Zappos, an online shoes and clothing retailer that's owned by Amazon.com. Zappos wants the matter to go into arbitration, citing its terms of service. The problem: A federal court just ruled that agreement completely invalid. So Zappos will have to go to court—or more likely settle to avoid those legal costs. Here's how Zappos screwed up, according to Eric Goldman, a law professor and director of Santa Clara University's High Tech Law Institute: It put a link to its terms of service on its website, but didn't force customers to click through to it."
The whole TOS crap needs to change. If Zappos had forced people through the TOS page not one single extra person would have read it. It's just an arse covering law with no benefit to customers or vendors.
Ah, but many of those ToS'es include terms that are supposed to apply to activities that don't require registration or ordering - e.g., ToS restrictions on copying content to another site, linking to the site without permission, or suing the company due to information presented on the website.
So, coming next: Visitng ANY major site, even anonymously, will present you with a click-through ToS before you get ANYTHING from them. And to ensure that it remains legal and binding (especially as ToS frequently change), the selection will not be persisted in a cookie; you'll have to complete the ToS click-through at the start of every new session with the website.
Ugh. The web is about to become uglier.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
This is overdue. We've got to make it criminal fraud to make anything that sounds like a contract, but claims the 'contract' can be altered afterwards without your agreement.
Sounds like a big flyswatter, but making it criminal unleashes the shark lawyers to go after it while dragging the cops in their wake. It's the only way to get balance against the power of corporations to keep pulling this bullshit on individuals. And the crap will vanish overnight, so it's not like it'll plug up our court system.
Despite the fact that FORCED ARBITRATION is one sided and Bull shit...
Yeah.. blame the lawyers not the law makers.
aren't most of the law makers and judges also lawyers?
nobody's perfect
That's why it's non-enforceable in many parts of Canada.
I read the headline and got excited. The conclusion is disappointing. The biggest injustice when it comes to contracts, either ToS or not, is the ability to include stipulations that the signee may not engage in a class action suit or that the terms of the contract can be arbitrarily changed. I'm sure someone will argue that one doesn't have to sign any contract if they don't want to, but I don't see how one can function in society without 'agreeing' to outrageous contracts. If I never agreed (downloading software, visiting websites, purchasing something, working somewhere, etc.) to outrageous contracts I'd be forced to live like the Unabomber or worse . . . like Richard Stallman.
The results of this ruling could potentially just lead to a lot of annoying ToS splash screens when visiting web sites.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Whenever I signed up for a club card, it was pretty clear to me that I was receiving a discount in payment for my spending profile. With Costco or other "membership-only" stores, this is built in; and the membership fee is a straightforward economic decision (do your marginal savings relative to a non-membership big box store outweigh the membership cost?) In either case, I am being compensated for the harvesting of my information, and there is no personal risk involved. What's being presented in the article—forced binding arbitration in lieu of actual legal recourse—is an entirely different situation, because it amounts to a risk transfer (company reduces legal costs, customers who are "wronged" lose the recourse to recover losses). It's very one-sided, and I find it unbelievable that the judicial system would go along with this idea.