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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 The decision is 'unpublished,' meaning it isn't intended to be used as precedent in other cases.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."
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".
Surely the case should be against the film studios that made the films and not Netflix which is just distributing them ?
It's unpublished because it wasn't considered consequential.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 Per the unpublished opinion: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.
Yet another way in which illegal file sharers provide a superior product.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
That would be like suing a book store for not having audiobooks and braille for all of their titles. Sometimes that little prick in a wheel chair causing trouble at the end of the day is just a little prick.
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.
And living near San Francisco, there's streets my mother or grandmother wouldn't be able to climb. Even most locals won't walk in those areas. We can't control nature, but that's no excuse for not doing better than that when we can. Out of all the point of the ADA that could use fixing, you picked the one that makes perfect sense to complain about?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.)
They are being sued because a lawyer saw a chance to extort money from Netflix. AFAIK this lawyer didn't even have any plaintiffs.
For those that aren't aware we have a HUGE surplus of lawyers in this country. I'd wager better than half the law school graduates these days can't find jobs. What that means in practical terms is that we have a whole lot of lawyers trying to survive by launching lawsuits in "creative" manners. In plain English there are a bunch of sleazy lawyers trying to extort money from anyone they can using their law degrees. You see this in suits like this and the blatant extortion going on in the copyright trolling regime. It doesn't help that the legal profession seems to draw sociopaths to the career.
Expect to see these type of lawsuits all the time for the next decade at least.
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...
The ADA was written in such a way that it is only triggered BY lawsuits. The government refuses to actually inspect or regulate, but instead drops the burden on the disabled community to enforce it themselves. It was a brilliant piece of anti-disabled propaganda slid into the law since it was intended to inspire just the type of attitude that you have.