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Supreme Court Upholds Arbitration In DirectTV Case
An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 decision that DirecTV’s service agreement barring mass arbitration by its customers must be enforced. The NYTimes reports: "The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that dissatisfied customers of DirecTV in California could not band together in a class action and must instead pursue individual arbitrations. The decision, by a 6-to-3 vote, was the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions that have made it harder for consumers to go to court to pursue claims of fraud and defective products."
Sounds like as many users that can afford to sue should do that individually, and i wonder if it wouldn't cause problems for the judges/justice system to have tons of individual case where one big case would have sufficed. If they worked together they may even be able to bring the price down a bit on individual cases as there is a lot of work in common for all the cases.
would love to see a real life "ddos" XD
So why didn't totally bar arbitration altogether in its service agreement? In small print, "You cannot sue us, anytime, anywhere over anything. Period. No exceptions. Don't even dream of trying to contact a lawyer."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Any legal accountability corporations had just dissipated into the ether. It's no longer a "If class action settlement $X is less than recall cost $Y, then we do Z", now it's "if X% of affected customers go to arbitration, with average settlement $Y, and X*Y recall cost Z, then we don't recall." I'm willing to bet that the proportion of people who would bother to do the effort of arbitration for a low chance of being granted a pittance is far less than the tiny proportion of a class who apply for an already-approved class-action settlement (and get a $7 rebate coupon). In addition, punitive damages go away, unless a regulatory agency prosecutes.
Binding arbitration is now fully SCOTUS-approved, and I expect it'll become a standard component of every "take it or leave it" legal contract.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
No doubt Stephen Breyer, one of the Justices who upheld this decision, just happens to have more than one tie to AT&T (parent company of Direct TV) CEO Randall Stephenson. Once again Americia, another government official with ZERO accountability who can use their position to benefit his buddies.
These clowns have been bought and paid for for quite a while now. Honestly, they are supposed to uphold the constitution not bow to their corporate masters.
But they are all lawyers, so of course they will act like scumbags.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...why Tivo isn't suing the everliving shit out of DirecTV. Conversely, I would like to know why DirecTV even still claims to actually sell "DirecTivos" anymore. If you try to actually get one you just get a never-ending runaround.
Looks like there's another product/service I won't be purchasing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Individual arbitration? Why waste the time and money? Instead, just stop paying the bastards.
If enough people are upset, setup a site to coordinate these many thousands of people and issue a warning to DirectTV (or Comcast, whoever) that on a specific date, tens of thousands of users are going to refuse to pay their bill - period. To make this really effective, have an escrow account setup where the money gets deposited to show that this is a protest.
Truth be told, tens of thousands of people refusing to pay might not be enough to catch DirectTV's attention but get a few hundred thousand people threatening to withhold payment and the accountants are going to look at what that does to the cash flow and scream.
What I like about this is idea is that it's the perfect method for Americans to protest because they don't actually have to do anything, all they have to do is nothing (as in don't pay their bill). Let's face it, we, as a nation, excel at doing nothing.
I had a friend who was a county sheriff.
One of his responsibilities was to oversee the county jail.
Once all the prisoners decided to sue him for better food.
He had 50 law suites to answer individually.
He found a lawyer that could do each one separately, but at a bulk rate.
Ending up costing $50 per suite.
The food was fine and he won them all.
The Direct TV customers may not be able to band together inside the courtroom,
but they should still be able to just outside the door.
This might put things on a sufficiently even playing field to get results.
Corporations can legally enjoy the rights of individuals for legal reasons but groups of people cannot enjoy the same rights in suing a corporation? How about if the group of people being screwed by DirectTV incorporate then sue the pants off of them instead of a class action suit?
First of all, good luck finding any service or company that doesn't include the arbitration clauses in their TOS. It's standard practice and has been for a few years now. You would have to be a Quaker to avoid it completely, and I"m not even sure if that would be enough.
You are unlikely to get any significant number of users to want to band together to not pay their bills, and there is no way in hell anyone but an idiot would send a payment to an escrow account run by some random person on the internet. Might as well send it to that Kenyan prince since you are just as likely to see the money again and with the prince at least he promised a profit. Just not paying is not going to get much attention other than a few facebook likes and shares, which don't mean anything. No one sane would threaten their credit score for a pointless protest that will just be ignored by the giant corporation.
Face it, we are screwed.
Seems like they would realize that nearly every company in certain industries will eventually have this in their contracts making it so that consumers will be forced into agreement to this. Some of them are basically unavoidable in modern life, such as Microsoft & Apple both having it in their agreements. Same with having a bank or debit account.
just wait for GOP health care where they have a non doctor say what is per ex after the fact sticking you with the full bill + no court due to a forced arbitration
if people are that fed up with their service and actually do something about it... this could be the death by a thousand cuts.
I had DirecTV for four whopping days before I cancelled it because of phone-bouncing between departments for 90 minutes trying to find out why my internet services were not delivered.
DirecTV charged me a $135 termination fee. I challenged the fee by demanding a contract with my signature that obligates me to that fee. Their response was the contract was "implied" when they started the service.
"Implied" contracts - IE non-signed - are inadmissable and not enforceable in a court of law. I didn't seek relief in court for obvious economic reasons. But I am not shy about discouraging everyone I know from accepting services from DirecTV.
The question that has not been answered in the cases in this article is this: do the parties have a signed contract in the dispute? If not, then DirecTV has no legal mandate to termination fees under contract law and the class action status should had been allowed.
There is no law that mandates agreement to a legal document in exchange for layman services or sales. Anymore if I am handed a paper that is contains any legalese, I respond that I will not sign it until I review it with my lawyer, and I reserve the right to amend the contract. People do this with real estate leases and contracts all the time. A signed receipt for sales or services is not an agreement to a legal contract.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
It is NOT the SCOTUS' responsibility to strike down bad but constitutional laws. To do so would be judicial activism. Congress is the culprit - they passed this special interest legislation and they should fix it.
Class action was the last thing we had to defend our rights. Right now with Unions dead there isn't really anything else that brings together enough of the American working class to stand up to a large corporation.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I want to know what got their panties in such a twist over a TV service that they decided legal action was necessary. My guess is that they should be suing the installers and not the parent company, as the technicians that DirecTV contracts to are some of the least intelligent people I've had the pleasure of working with.
Perhaps they will become more consumer friendly.
All companies will adopt these terms, so "not paying them" will quickly cease to be an option unless you want to become a hermit living in a cave.
I am sure I sound naive, but is this not the kind of thing a kickstarter type campaign would be perfect for?
Surly, there are at least hundreds of Lawyer who if not directly effected by this type of skulduggery, would donate their some pro- bono time to make a nice form for people to file against DTV, with the filing fees included, as well as other nefarious companies who rely on these tactics to continually screw their "customers"?
I am not sure, but I understand that all Lawyers in the U.S. must provide one pro-bono service a year, right? what an excellent Christmas present for DTV, AT&T, and other greedy corporations. Millions of individual lawsuits. Hmmmm.
Deck the halls with Reams of Lawsuits, fa, law law law law, law law law law law...
The following article describes the legal rise of arbitration eliminating class action suits.
Washington Monthly, June/July/August 2014
"Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can't sue." by Lina Khan
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...
Interestingly, a recent post at Washington Monthly reported that we have "Sharia" law in the U.S., as some companies require that arbitration be through religious mediators. (In the cases mentioned, Christian and Scientology arbitrators.)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...
Except that a lot of these scumbags not only require you to "waive your right to class-action" but also to "submit to binding arbitration" (usually an arbitrator assigned by the corp).
It seems, if everyone banded together to boycott Direct TV, it would cost the company a whole lot more than $50.
Most of these lawsuits happen after a purchase was already made. I was part of a small class action and ended up subscribing to a class action newsletter. It really opened my eyes. There's a ton of class action lawsuits. Many of them are for false or multiplicative advertising claims or knowingly selling dangerous products. An example, a product labeled 100% almond milk. The 100% doesn't refer to the contents, but to the milk. 100% of the milk used in the product was made from almonds, but only 3% of the liquid in the product was milk. It is purposely misleading and companies make billions playing these games and tricking people into buy things they don't think they're buying. Another example: 100% medical grade silicone in some cookware, implying the item was made completely out of silicone. The label actually meant 100% of the silicone is medical grade. Silicone made up 30% of the item and the other 70% percent was toxic materials. The other materials were never listed.
It comes as no surprise. The US government and the legal system has been controlled by the rich and their corporations for years. Citizens no longer have rights even remotely equal to them. A shift needs to happen that gives rights back to the people.
The next president will nominate new SCOTUS judges. See who voted the asshole way? Only judges nominated by republicans. This is the most important issue of the election.