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Comment by skrap | Hacker News Reader

> Consumers are being informed right now. A scandal can kill a company or a private inspector in a way that it can't kill a corporate oligarchy or bad regulation.

I'm not convinced. Scandals don't scale. How many scandals per year do people actually have the attention and outrage to push through into action? 10? 100?

It's my opinion that we need regulation to set the ground rules of our interactions with companies, which will always ALWAYS be tempted to deceive us. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent 2 minutes in any corporate marketing department.

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I agree. scandal is not enough. If somebody is guilty of fraud he should be sued by everybody.

In a good legal system many small claims should be bought and then somebody could sue the company for money. This would be a superior version of a class action lawsuit. A version that is actually practical and would scale.

Its also not a new idea, there are historical examples of this.

>In a good legal system many small claims should be bought and then somebody could sue the company for money. This would be a superior version of a class action lawsuit. A version that is actually practical and would scale.

This exists, it's called small claims court.

That goes in the right direction but there are many problem that hinder it from scaling.

A organisation can not buy millions of claims from consumers and the fight a full class action lawsuit without any of these people being involve.

You make no sense.

If you want to sue CVS for selling you fake aloe go ahead, it costs less than $100 to file a small claims case in my state and CVS will very likely settle with you outside of court because it's cheaper than sending someone to court to defend the company.

Today you can not buy up a hole group of claims and make a collective action suit on behave of the other people. That is not legal.

There are many other problems with the courts that make the system I proposed currently impossible.

In what way is your proposal meaningfully different than a class action suit?

Class action suits are actually legal.

When you can buy and sell a legal action like that it strikes me as a super bad idea. Wouldn't there be some legal equivalent of the patent trolls who today purchase outdated patents and then go around filing nuisance suits based on them?

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