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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer but the "reasonable person" test seems relevant here?

A reasonable person would think the EULA clickthrough on their set-top box to watch Disney+ might have some impact on consuming media and paying for it. But nobody would imagine that EULA would extend to other Disney products, especially in meatspace.

ALSO if that were true, it means that some park goers did not have Disney+ contracts and they would be under different liability routes than subscribers.

ALSO what if someone bought a DVD or t-shirt with its own license, then does that apply to physical harm at the park?

It seems to a lay person, what happens on the set-top stays on the set top.

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The legal standard is, roughly, if the contract is "unconscionable".

The courts have repeatedly ruled that most arbitration agreements are enforcable.

The FTC has previously attempted rule making to invalidate predispute arbitration agreements, but a trump era Congress "disapproved" the rule. The solution at this point requires an act of Congress.

https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/ is my website where I try and summarise everything I know along with sources.

You might want to add contact info to your website.

Agreed.

I originally did not do so since it was incomplete and I was a bit worried about the association.

It's all in a public git repo so my name was never truly hidden. But now that I'm using it more, it does make sense to be more explicit about who runs the site and what "qualifications" I have.

It may not happed immediately but added to my TODO list.

That line of thinking could actually prove beneficial long term. Here's my line of thought:

Once people would realize buying multiple products or services from one vendor gets you into legal trouble, consumers might shy away from big corporations. That would give big corporations an incentive to split up into smaller ones.

In the end this is just one aspect of the problems caused by companies getting too big.

I suspect this is wishful thinking. Even people who see news like this probably think: "that could never happen to me". Beyond that, it's very difficult to keep track of all the subsidiaries and "affiliates" a single huge company may have under its umbrella. The article uses the example of DirectTV using AT&T's arbitration clause to claim that lawsuits against DirectTV must go to arbitration:

> In multiple class action cases, DirecTV pointed to arbitration clauses in contracts that the plaintiffs had signed – not with the satellite TV company, but with the phone services provider AT&T Mobility, when the individuals had purchased cell phones. DirecTV argued the arbitration language in the cell phone contracts applied to the telemarketing claims, because, years later, AT&T Mobility’s parent corporation acquired DirecTV, making it an “affiliate,” as referenced in the contract’s arbitration language.

I didn't know that AT&T's parent company owned DirectTV. Did you?

Good point, I think you are right. Most people have given up on reading fine print on privacy etc. Most people use Google, Meta, Amazon because hey they already have their filthy fingers everywhere already. Resistance is futile.

Safe for a bunch of zealots like myself that still try to manoeuvre around Big Tech, using inferior web search, archaic operating systems, local backups, etc.

The future is gloomy.

>> some park goers did not have Disney+ contracts and they would be under different liability routes than subscribers.

That is rather normal. People come to theme parks under a variety of ways. Some are just walk-ups subject to whatever waiver comes with buying a paper ticket. Others buy tickets online in other states/countries, places with maybe different rules about waivers. Some come with tour groups which might create new liability structures. Others are children, with rights that may or may not be able to be waived by their parents. And some people walking around the park are on free or donated tickets who may or may not have clicked anything.

I'd similarly think a reasonable person wouldn't expect that they're agreeing to never file a lawsuit against the company and to instead always go through arbitration, even for the product in question. As the article notes, most people don't know the significance of the agreement.

Perhaps said another way: if someone is going to go skydiving, it's reasonable to assume the thing that you're signing is to say, "I won't sue you if I get hurt," but it's a different thing to be sitting at a computer and agree, "I'll never sue you for any wrongdoing," when you sign up for some wholly digital service.

Would binding arbitration clauses apply to the POTUS or are they exempt since the supreme court put them above the law? Probably doesn't come up much, just wondering about these sorts of edge cases. Could Trump sue disney if he got a trial membership to disney+ while in the white house?

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