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Click Like? You May Have Given Up the Right To Sue
sandbagger (654585) writes "The New York Times reports that General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, or 'join' it in social media communities. Who'd have imagined that clicking like requires a EULA?"
They could also write in that if I click 'like' on a cereal facebook page I would have to kill myself, but that doesn't make it legally binding.
General Mills... has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, or 'join' it in social media communities
It might even be worse than that, according to an interview I heard on NPR earlier - the language of General Mills' new terms appears to include merely purchasing any of their products as a method of forcing you to waive your right to sue.
Of course, they also said one could "opt-out" by sending an email to the company... Anybody got a list of everybody's email addresses?
"Everybody" as in, every-fucking-body.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
and this ought to cement it. nobody reads that stuff. not even the lawyers. Microsoft was forced to allow refunds. some other cases ruled that click-through terms may be invalid for some claims. keep on keeping on, and if General Mills wants to waste lawyers generating snarky comments all over the public space, have at it. you will lose face.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
yeah, that will stand up in court.
It has for AT&T, Verizon, EA, Dropbox, etc. Why would General Mills' be treated any different than the other Corporate Masters?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
IANAL, but can I send them this? Note that I would include my name and birth year per their legal requirements if I decide to send it.
Any attempt to contact me via phone, email, or newspaper, constitutes acceptance of these legal terms. Any coupons for products produced by your company that are sent to me without my explicit request or that show up in an advertisement on the internet confirm your agreement to these terms.
I do not agree to binding arbitration. I do not agree to any terms which General Mills has proscribed. I hereby agree to ignore any response, and only to send bills in the amount of $100,000.00 to General Mills if I receive a response. If I currently have any existing customer relationship with General Mills I hereby declare that relationship null and void. Any coupons from General Mills which arrive in my mailbox or in my email will result in a $10,000.00 per coupon recycling charge.
ANY attempt to reply to my email will cost General Mills $100,000.00. There are no exceptions. If you disagree, if you think these terms are unfair, the only acceptable way to avoid payment of these terms that I have proscribed is to change your legal terms: http://generalmills.com/Legal_... to something compatible with US Constitutional law.
Again, I am not bound by your legal terms. If your legal team finds some way that I am inadvertently bound by your legal terms (e.g. member of a particular website, that I was not aware was owned by General Mills), then General Mills owes me $100,000.00 and is required to remove me from that website at its own expense. If after that removal, you find that I'm still somehow related to General Mills in anyway, that will be another $100,000.00. So get it right the first time! Because I explicitly requested not to be bound by your legal terms and this notice serves as a record of that statement per your own legal terms.
Until we hear about this actually holding up in court, which I highly doubt it will. Large companies are preemptively covering their asses in any way they can by flinging shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. I imagine that they've done this in several other ways that also wouldn't be likely to stand up in court, but if any one method does, then the payoff is huge so it makes sense to do it.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
I fond not using facebook has worked best.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How it stood up for all companies listed? Give us links to that stories!
yeah, that will stand up in court.
It has for AT&T, Verizon, EA, Dropbox, etc. Why would General Mills' be treated any different than the other Corporate Masters?
The big difference here is that the agreement is not apparent or possibly even presented to the user at the time or before hand. You can like something on facebook that a friend liked, and you would never see that agreement. Ditto if you tweeted something to their twitter account (which I assume they would include in this). Even with today's corporate friendly courts I can't see how they would not get laughed out of the courtroom for trying to pull this card out.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It stood up where there was an actual contract or financially backed transaction in place, not just off the back of a random click on a website.
They don't pay as much for for preferential treatment as the other guys. Their only need for lobbying is to ensure farm subsidies are as high as possible to force down the market price for grain.
Actually, the best way to force prices for grain downwards is to *remove* government subsidies, since most of them go towards paying farmers to limit their harvest output, thereby keeping per-bushel prices high.
Same with any other non-processed food item - dump the subsidies, and farmers will have to increase production to make up for it. This in turn will force prices down for those food items.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The Like button has created a quandary for millions. It may be possible for you to "unlike" something, but that has not nearly the force of a "dislike" button. In order to get your voice heard at all, one has to "Like" the product to become associated with it. Then you can rant and rave about how bad it is. This makes about as much sense as clicking "Start" to shutdown your computer.
The "Like" button also doesn't provide the expression one needs when confronted with a post such as 'My mom just died." What do you do? Like it? Not Like it? Dislike might be a better choice in this instance as well.
Of course, Facebook wouldn't allow a Dislike button. That would be too negative.
So, just don't use Facebook, or acknowledge the existence thereof.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Don't buy their products. Boycott.
Corporations only listen to their bottom line, and we can make a lot of noise by simply not buying and encouraging everyone we know to do the same.
Sadly, I was not a fan of General Mills' products to begin with. Fortunately, it'll make a boycott for me rather painless.
But sending a message that this sort of behavior is unacceptable would be a good thing.
Municipalities should simply place a large tax on items sold with an arbitration clause. Then General Mills can watch what happens to there market share as people learn Tastee O's taste pretty damn similar to Cheerio's. And on another front, I guess minors will no longer be able to buy food because they are not old enough to enter binding contracts of any form?
I think small claims court is an under utilized weapon that we have. Everyone wants to sue big. We need a lot of people to start nickle and dime these companies in small claims court. In my state it costs $35 and claims could be up to $3000. The company can send only one person and it cannot be a lawyer. We can file in our local towns and they would have to travel there. Odds are, they will settle.
'nuf said.
That's the only way to get companies to stop doing shit like this. Hit them where it hurts...the bottom line.
Thanks General Mills, that makes it pretty simple. I know what cereal I won't be buying.
They're different. You're actually signing (or clicking through) something with them. This sounds like they're trying to say if you like them on Facebook (no EULA pops up when you like something) that you can never sue them. This will never stand up in court.
Is there any chance that the lawyers who knowingly and intentionally come up with such ideas and try to implement them could be disbarred? Few measures would more effectively discourage the practice.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
But how do you know which parts are relevant to you?
I mean, you might think a little thing like the Constitution is perfectly clear when it lays out the rules for regulating interstate commerce. I bet you didn't know that growing wheat on your own small farm and eating it yourself is interstate commerce.
The current subsidies have the direct effect of reducing supply (since they are not subsidies on the growth of food, but on letting farmland remain fallow...the way to get the money is to have farmland and not grow food on it).
This is only sort of right. IWADFUSDA (I was a developer for the USDA).
My main application issued 2 types of subsidies, to the tune of $4b a year. The first was a direct subsidy. The government says "we will pay you X dollars per ${unit_of_measure} of Y commodity. You grew Z ${units_of_measure}, therefore you get X*Z dollars." There were complex eligibility and attribution rules, but that was the basic idea. This subsidy program was not renewed in the latest Farm Bill.
The other subsidy happened after harvest and market. The government would say "We wanted the market price of Y commodity to be A dollars per ${unit_of_measure}. It was, in fact, A - B dollars. Therefore, in addition to your direct subsidy, we will pay you a "counter cyclical" subsidy of B dollars." If the market price of the commodity was higher than the targetted price, no payment was issued. This subsidy program expired in 2011 or 2012 (I don't remember exactly), and, like the above, was not renewed in the Farm Bill.
I did also do some work on a conservation program. A farmer goes to the government and says "I think these acres on my farm are wetlands/${some_other_environmental_gem}." The government says "We will pay you X dollars per year to not grow crops on this land for Y years." I didn't spend much time on this one, so I don't know the finer points.
I'm not saying these were the only programs around, but the types of programs varied widely. The direct payment program was a big player in the USDA though.
My old coworkers tell me that the latest Farm Bill has shifted emphasis dramatically from subsidy programs to crop insurance programs.