Microsoft ending consumers' ability to file class-action suits
latimes.com
latimes.com
It seems to us from the outside that the legal system of USA no longer makes any sense. What is bad that USA forces other countries to copy its broken legal system.
However, the contracts are usually written to say that any parts which are found to be illegal are severed from the contract, so as long as such clauses are allowed, very few contracts are likely to illegal.
It was only recently (~5 years ago) that they started to use it to ban class action lawsuits (instead forcing individual arbitration). The act neither explicitly allows or precludes this. Before you say that should make the answer obvious, realize class action lawsuits are entirely a judicial creation. There is no law that was ever passed to create the idea of a class action lawsuit, it was created entirely from whole cloth (well, imported is a better description) by judges.
Somewhat ironically, the supreme court that folks are yelling about is also the same court that basically created the notion of representative in the US.
It'll get overruled by a judge the moment they are taken to court.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that this is legal.
They're basically acting like the little kid who owns the ball everybody's playing with: it's his rules or the highway. But that is still different from actively stopping people from doing things.
Even so, it's pretty horrible and I would love this to be unenforceable. Meanwhile I'll just use Linux, thank you very much.
Firstly, all these pesky class action lawsuits where each participant can get $7 [1] do absolutely nothing but enrich lawyers. I really don't see the point in them. So frankly I don't care if those go away.
But I guess it's some form of accountability.
Also, depending on the jurisdiction these provisions prohibiting or restricting you from suing may be unenforceable anyway.
[1]: A law firm will file a lawsuit on behalf of a number of participants (eg my monitor really isn't 19", it's 17.7" display size). The law firm will seek certification by a court as a class. At that point they'll sign up as many people as they can. These lawsuits nearly end up in settlement so the defendants may settle for, say, $10 million. The law firm keeps $3 million (give or take) as they're paid on a contingency basis. The million people they got to sign up will get $7 each.
There are alternatives; in some countries, the public prosecutors take a bigger role and will prosecute those kinds of things on behalf of the public, instead of providing a mechanism for the public to band together into classes.
So are they banking on just defaulting to the judges decision and paying the money for such cases and then hoping that not many people will bother to pursue?
Personally I'd love to be in Redmond when, on the back of this decision, they get half-a-million or more court summons in the post one day.
My iPod nano worked just fine, my Netflix DVDs showed up in a reasonable time frame, I don't have receipts for the RAM I bought back in 1998, the list goes on and on. Consumers did not come out ahead as a result of those class actions.
Maybe a million is unachievable, but the idea is there.
Yes, but it would also cost that much to everyone suing. Would you lose a day of work (Say, $20/transport + ~$150 if you're make $40K a year, ~$400 if you're around $100K) to recover $10, even if you knew you had 100% chance of winning?
Almost no one would. (And almost no one does)
That said, the evidence is not on my side with that.
As for stare decisis, the Supreme Court often deals with cases for which there is no precedent. Isn't that precisely the type of case we're dealing with here?
There are no cases in which there is no precedent. It may be a new technology, or a new law, or a new amendment, but there is never an utter lack of precedent. In this case, I used stare decisis to mean that the court should choose to let the decision stand and not overrule the lower court.