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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
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.
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.