> We each waive any right to a jury trial
Is this a common thing to put into terms?
Is this a common thing to put into terms?
I've only seen it in print once, but then again, I'm not in a situation to sign contracts like that often. I refused, since I can't imagine a scenario where it benefits me.
I’m serious. If the expectation is that I can be bothered to check for updates to 1000’s of terms of service every morning, why shouldn’t they be expected to hire someone to check personal homepages and social media accounts for such things?
“Last writer wins” in US contract law (roughly speaking, IANAL), and I’m reasonably sure I can establish that my addendum “happens after” company terms of service updates.
I’m happy to agree to binding arbitration, or flying to Washington to have a (corrupt?) judge or whatever process my complaint for a meagre $10,000 per hour (plus expenses) for the duration of the dispute.
Edit: payable up front, regardless of the outcome of the dispute.
I do agree with the sentiment though. IMO, if one party to a contract cannot have a reasonable expectation (!) that the contract was read by the other party, the contract should be considered invalid.
German / European courts have ruled many times that consumer TOS clauses which are "surprising" and/or "unusual" (e.g. "hidden" feed or waivers) are not enforceable.
I am well within my rights to modify the copy of a contract supplied to me, so it can hardly be said to be fraudulent to do such a thing. It isn't my fault that they don't want a copy of what I actually agreed to...
I really would like to see someone use this tactic in court. I am quite curious what the legal status of it would be and what the follow up arms race would look like if it a court sided with the user in such a case. I can imagine naive counters where they submit hashes of the agreed upon contents and suddenly typoes become legally binding when they refuse to accept such a modification.
I have used this to buy tickets to an event for $1.
No, it wasn't unfair to the vendor. The vendor had an issue on a web site where the sales window closed, presumably to give the vendor time to process sales and print/mail tickets, but this was enforced front-end only. I was mid-check-out when the window closed with no warning.
There were plenty of tickets left. There was plenty of time left too (the vendor had switched from paper to digital tickets for COVID19, so...).
I think there was an exploitable security bug in there too, but I don't think anyone will exploit it. It's a little shop.
He was also storing passwords as plain text (they would email your password when you clicked "lost password?")... which is pretty troubling for a site that was also taking credit card payments.
So of course I edited the page to let the submission through anyway, and the POST request had the appropriate consent boolean parameter to false instead of true. Since the registration completed successfully, they either ignored that parameter, or - what I was hoping would happen - their database had my row with a distinct FALSE on the consent column.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I decided to follow up on their data processing against my consent. Would I have a successful case? Or would they can me for working around their bit of client-side JS?
You would go to court to sue Amazon. They would claim the suit should be dismissed because you had agreed to mandatory arbitration. You would claim you had NOT agreed to that clause, because you configured your browser to render different text before clicking on "I agree".
The court would then declare that since you had represented to Amazon that you were agreeing to it, they weren't responsible for what text you had changed in your browser, and the court would hold you to the contract that was supplied to you.
This isn't even a slight stretch. A stretch would be when Wells Fargo opened bank accounts for people without their permission -- then blocked a class action lawsuit arguing that the terms and conditions for the account (which the customers hadn't signed up for) required arbitration instead of class action lawsuits.[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210428120303/https://www.nytim...
Perhaps in the future legal aspects of life will be just another kind of software updating, with the govt rolling out emergency patches and big annual feature packs.
Certified mail to their registered agent is considered “received” by the corporation in most contexts.
The difference here may be that there's already a contract between a user and the company, so if they include something like "continuing to provide service to my account constitutes acceptance of these terms." in the updated contract, it might fly.
Or not. It could be that all the businesses doing that to their users are just BS'ing something unenforceable.
As i understand it, in many states it does not preclude a jury trial, but serves as a gate for the trial ... should mediation fail, a jury trial will still happen.
Prevents those "lets stick it to that big company" decisions too.
Considering how badly they disrespect peoples' time and pandemic safety in scheduling jury duty, most educated, busy, and capable people would want to get out of it, leaving very likely a bunch of less-educated people and anti-vaxxers to be on the jury.
The modern state with mostly impartial judiciary seems pretty good right now, but i imagine that wasn't true in various times and places.
Jury nullification is also an interesting practise (see for example abortion in canada)
Don’t mistake SCOTUS justices’ philosophical differences as partiality.
And that's before we actually look at the reliability of a jury trial: the letter of the law might claim it's a jury of peers, but that's never the case from the outset, and then lawyers get to demand that the only people who might actually do any reasonable thinking get replaced if they know a reasonable thinking person would conclude their client's guilty.
The system is so messed up, you could write multiple books about it. Which people have.
Did they actually use those words? As far as I remember they convicted Monsanto mostly on messing with the "independent" studies that should have confirmed their weed killers safety, using various "friends" in key positions to shut down any study that went out of line before it could go anywhere. All documented in an internal email chain discussing various means in great detail.
> shuddered at the lunacy of the nonscientific verdict,
Science went out of the window the moment Monsanto started to actively taint the research through political means.
^1 The results of independent studies are supposed to act as basis for government approval.