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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."
The company wants arbitration instead of class action suits because arbitration tends to work better for the companies than getting hit by the actual law.
Users tend to sign away their right to legal protection by agreeing to arbitration in terms of use etc., giving the company the ability to screw over large numbers of people while risking only individual lawsuits and not class action suits that would actually have some effect on the company's bottom line.
IMHO such use of arbitration should be generally illegal.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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.
Agreed. It's gotten so bad I'm fully expecting the SCOTUS to shit out a pretzel after it finishes the contortions necessary to explain why Dollar General should be allowed to ignore its contract with the Native American tribe that they signed, agreeing to subject itself to Native American court jurisdiction, without allowing every other "person" to ignore the jurisdiction-setting clause in every single contract in this country.
It'll probably involve something like claiming that because mere humans can only exist in one physical location they must be subject to a jurisdiction no matter where in that country that jurisdiction is, even if it has nothing at all to do with the physical location of the human, while Corporate People exist everywhere and nowhere at once and therefore cannot be subject to any jurisdiction at all except by Their whims and Their whims are allowed to change whenever They feel the jurisdiction They chose has become doubleplusungood, despite what any contract heretofore executed shall claim.
http://indiancountrytodaymedia...
tl;dr: SCOTUS will find a way to justify letting Corporations out of their binding arbitration contracts while keeping the rest of the normal humans stuck in theirs.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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
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."
That's easy, because some places you can't waive legally guaranteed rights that are afforded to you by law by contract. It actually makes the entire contract void.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
This anti class action is also paired up with the requirement to use an arbitration system instead of the legal system. Arbitration is fine, if it is voluntary. Too many of these contracts require the arbitration though. This is the part that the courts should overturn if they had any sense of decency left.
The question is, how many non-violent methods remain available to citizens in order to redress the wrongs committed by corporations?