9th Circuit Rules Netflix Isn't Subject To Disability Law

An anonymous reader writes with news that the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled that Netflix doesn't have to caption their videos. "A federal appeals court ruled (PDF) yesterday that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn't apply to Netflix, since the online video provider is 'not connected to any actual, physical place.' Donald Cullen sued Netflix in March 2011, attempting to kick off a class-action lawsuit on behalf of disabled people who didn't have full use of the videos because they aren't all captioned. A district court judge threw out his lawsuit in 2013, and yesterday's ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upholds that decision. The decision is 'unpublished,' meaning it isn't intended to be used as precedent in other cases. However, it certainly doesn't bode well for any plaintiff thinking about filing a similar case in the 9th Circuit, which covers most of the Western US."

Comments

Re:Not to mention they aren't a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Hulu has captions. Amazon Prime Video has captions. It's not like you're being completely denied the joys of interwebs TV.

Netflix has captions too. They are suing because Netflix doesn't have captions on 100% of its programming. As in "they aren't all captioned".

Nonprecedential but citable.

[Etherwalk]

Ninth Circuit unpublished cases issued after 2006 can be cited to. They are not binding precedent, so a court doesn't *have* to follow them and you don't want to cite to them if you don't have to, but they do have a small but important persuasive role where the facts are very similar to a new case.

Re:Nonprecedential but citable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in number of cases, not percentage. You have to take into account the vast size of the 9th district and the number of cases they take to understand why that often quoted statistic is meaningless.

Re:Nonprecedential but citable.

[AuMatar]

The 9th circuit is the largest court with the most cases. So of course it has more overturned. When viewed by percentages they're one of the least overturned courts. The whole "9th is the most overturned court" meme is from Republican wishful thinking trying to downplay importance of cases out of there,

Re:Nonprecedential but citable.

[Etherwalk]

Enh... where I'm hesitating here is that the 9th has a reputation as the most overturned court in the nation, and that may have a bearing on the argument also. (Although, IANAL, I believe if a lower decision is upheld, as in this case, it can't be sent to the supreme court, so they can't be overturned here.)

No; the Supreme Court can generally hear cases from Circuit Courts of Appeals or State Supreme Courts (on Federal or Constitutional issues) regardless of which way the case went. The only obvious exceptions are where they lack jurisdiction because there is no genuine "case or controversy" as required by the Constitution, or where Congress has specifically excluded a law or area from being reviewable by them. (Congress has a Constitutionally granted power to do this, with some limitations. It rarely does.)

Re:Nonprecedential but citable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you need a little more info than you supply. For example, what are you using to determine reversal rate? Reversals of all cases heard by the court, or only those appealed AND heard by SCOTUS?

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/intelprop/magazine/LandslideJan2010_Hofer.authcheckdam.pdf for the full details.

Looking at the 9th Circuit: From FY99 to FY08, they closed 114,199 cases (the largest number of all circuits...the 5th and 11th are distant second and third overall numbers-wise) . Inthe same timeframe, SCOTUS heard only 175 cases ruled on by the 9th Circuit. Even if all 175 were reversed, it would be less than than 2% of all cases heard in the 9th Circuit would have been reversed. The reality is, not all cases heard by SCOTUS are reversed or remanded back to the lower court , and as the SCOTUS only really hears cases where contraversy exists (ie two or more circuits disagree on how an issue should be ruled) or where there are significant Consitutional issues, it isn't surprising that the court with the largest number of cases has the largest number of cases heard by SCOTUS, and subsequently the largest number reversed.

Re:Not to mention they aren't a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix also has captions/subtitles. Just not -everything- has it. It's not a deficiency of the service but rather the content.

Take into account that:
a) Most DVD's have "hard" subtitles, so anything from a DVD source is not going to have subtitles on Netflix unless someone goes out of their way to OCR them (like pirates do)
b) Most BD source content has actual "text" subtitles that can be styled, and thus no transcription is required.

You're going to find that Anime will normally have subtitles for the dialog only. While English language content will only carry subtitles/captions if the original source content had it, eg some documentaries will have it. On the average, just about everything on Netflix does indeed have subtitles, but I don't know if everything does.

Re:Yify

[Anonymous Coward]

Yify torrents also have more artifacts than the Smithsonian. It may *technically* be 1080p but it's not fooling anyone.

Unpublished

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unpublished because it wasn't considered consequential. The panel affirmed the judgment without hesitation because existing precedent was crystal clear. Per the unpublished opinion:

We have previously interpreted the statutory term “place of public accommodation” to require “some connection between the good or service complained of and an actual physical place.” See Weyer v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 198 F.3d 1104, 1114 (9th Cir. 2000). Because Netflix’s services are not connected to any “actual, physical place,” Netflix is not subject to the ADA. See id. Therefore, in light of Weyer, Cullen’s ADA-predicated Disabled Persons Act and Unruh Civil Rights Act claims fail as a matter of law. See id.

In other words, the actually interesting case occurred in 2000 where it was decided that there must be a nexus among the good or service, the public accommodation, and a physical place. Your TV or computer might exist in a physical place, but it doesn't constitute a public place of accommodation. If we presume for the sake of argument that Netflix headquarters is a public place of accommodation, that's not where the relevant good or service is provided. All three things must come together for the ADA to apply.

It would suck if the plaintiff won. I love captions, and am glad that Netflix recently added them, but if Netflix lost this case then anybody with a business website would be required to make their site compatible with screen readers, etc. That's a good idea in principle, but to require by law everybody to do that would be insane.
Congress or a regulatory agency can always craft a much more narrowly tailored law which provides the same substantial benefit.

Re:Unpublished

[Anubis IV]

In the Target case, the court certified the plaintiff as a class that could initiate a class action suit on the basis that they may have been being discriminated against in the "enjoyment of goods, services, facilities, or privileges". An out-of-court settlement was reached between Target and the plaintiff, so the matter was never settled in court.

The problem? The court handling the Target case is in the 9th Circuit Court's jurisdiction, and the 9th Circuit Court had already established a precedent over this exact same topic way back in 2000 (if that case looks familiar, it's because it's the same precedent they're citing in the current case). If you look in section II.B, what you'll see is that the 9th asserts the whole "enjoyment" thing only pertains to places of "public accommodation", and that if you understand "public accommodation" in the context in which it was used, it's abundantly clear that Congress was specifically talking about physical locations (it really is pretty clear...even without being a lawyer, the language is easy to understand). Congress even gave examples, like zoos, restaurants, auditoriums, and laundromats. Notably missing: mail order catalogs, infomercials, or any number of other ways that people might have procured goods and services (that text was written in 1990, so it's understandable that the Internet wouldn't have been mentioned).

Which is to say, the lower court decided that instead of following precedent, they'd ignore it and interpret the ADA text in a way that was both contrary to how the relatively plain and easy to understand language was written by Congress and was also contrary to how the higher court they are under had said it should be interpreted. The judge in the Target case even made comments indicating their interest in seeing the plaintiff's success in the case help extend the law into areas where it hadn't reached before (i.e. places where it wasn't supposed to reach to begin with, a fact which the judge was ignoring). Moreover, had that case been allowed to progress, it would have established a wide-reaching precedent that could have been used to impose ADA restrictions on practically anything and everything, even when it would make no sense to do so.

All of which is to say, whatever precedent might have been set by that court would have been wiped out by the 9th's earlier decision that was completely contrary to theirs. Had Target not settled, I'd wager that they'd have easily won in appeals, since the next court up is the 9th, and they appear to have a better memory for precedent than the lower court does.

Disclaimer: IANAL

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Get in a wheelchair and try wheeling your ass up anything steeper than 1/12. It's not as easy as you seem to think. Oh by the way at 1/10 be careful your chair doesn't tip backwards and land you on your head.

Naturally occurring hills cant be helped. An entry ramp can.

Re:Good

[rahvin112]

Naturally occurring terrain isn't regulated by the ADA. Access to a business is.

Re:Not to mention they aren't a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Shows are required by law to have captioning but they are not required by law to have good captioning. Hence networks taking minimum cost automated voice to text option.

Re:Blame the lawyer surplus....

[rahvin112]

What a bunch of hogwash. The problem with lawyers is that for the last 30 years everyone has encouraged their kids to become lawyers. It's in every fucking TV show and movie since the 50's. Since the 50's it has been seen as one of a very short list of professions that would get wealthy and have guaranteed jobs. The vast oversupply is tied to that not your partisan bullshit. Talk about absurd but I can't expect much from someone like you. You are either a conspiracy minded nut or are being paid to spread propaganda. Either of which means your value as a human being is NILL.

The only thing I will be remembering at election time is that BOTH parties serve the same master and that master has interests contrary to my benefit. I will also keep in mind that a lessor evil is better and that I'd rather have a tax and spend democrat in the presidents office than a tax-cut and spend republican who's bent on regulating what I do in my bedroom. Neither party has my interests at heart but the democrats are the lessor evil. The only republican president in the last 30 years that had an ounce of fiscal responsibility was George HW Bush (Bush Senior). Every other president has been a fiscal train wreck with tax-cut and spend. This country is 17 trillion in debt because of the last republican president.

Re:Not to mention they aren't a monopoly

[Dahamma]

The actual FCC rule about whether captions are required for streaming depends on two things: when the content originally aired on TV and when the device displaying them was built/updated (so that devices that were built before the rules don't apply). It's actually pretty fair.

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/capt...

The lawsuit was basically an attempt by lawyers to apply the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) to Internet closed captions to argue that those reasonable FCC rules aren't enough, and they should "get money" from companies that are really trying as hard as they can to follow the actual rules...