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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This would be a better idea if the site it promotes didn't have overreaching terms of service. If they get sued for defamation, you, who posted a review, have to pay their costs.[1] Despite the site being run from Zurich, the terms have the line "In any circumstances where the foregoing Arbitration Agreement permits the parties to litigate in court, the parties hereby agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of the courts located within Netherlands County, California, for such purposes." There is no Netherlands County, California.

[1] https://www.buyforlife.com/terms-of-use

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Looks like they used this site to generate boilerplate Terms of Use: https://www.termsofusegenerator.net/

Same text is used by quite a few websites: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Netherlands+County%2C+Californi...

Not the OP, but I’m willing to bet this is just a copy paste of some generic boiler plate t&c with a bad search and replace applied.

I agree it’s not good though, and if that is the case, they should definitely pay to have some created for specifically for their site

Nice snooping around!

Tbh, those are really big red flags, that I wonder if it's even possible to trust the rest of the article.

Edit:- Seems that Netherlands County, California was on some template T&C that a lot of small firms just copied.

Errors like that can backfire. The American Arbitration Association now requires that a company putting an AAA consumer arbitration clause in a contract must first get approval from the AAA, and pay a $500 fee. See rule R-12 in [1]. The AAA made this rule specifically to stop companies from using bad arbitration clauses in boilerplate contracts.

There's a database of companies which have registered.[2] BuyForLife isn't listed. The AAA's reviewers would probably have caught the bogus terms and rejected the clause. A company that didn't register can usually use AAA services after registering late, but there are extra fees they have to pay before they can proceed.

So the arbitration clause is probably invalid. That throws any dispute into court. Which court? Specifying "Netherland, California" as a venue would invalidate the choice of venue clause. So the default rules on venue apply. Consumers can generally sue where the consumer is.

So, any site using that boilerplate probably can be sued in small claims court. Actually, the AAA lets you do that even if consumer arbitration is specified. See rule R-9 in [1]. Consumers usually do better in small claims court than in arbitration. Especially since the company has to send someone, or they lose.

Bad contract drafting of one-sided contracts is a great way to create a legal mess for yourself.

[1] https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/Consumer_Rules_Web_0...

[2] https://apps.adr.org/ClauseRegistryUI/faces/org/adr/extapps/...

Thanks for the really thorough explanation!

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