this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Unfortunately that's standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There's zero benefit to them.
Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk". That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk" - it's riskdiculous.
By "business risk", they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside
Yes that's what they mean. I tried to persuade against meaning that.
...and why not?
But...that's what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they'd all be doing that too.
The right to take legal action for harm done is imperative. It's importance is diminished if conflated with a legitimate business risk (like research and development). It should be illegal to deny it.
I agree. But we weren't discussing hypotheticals, we were discussing reality.
And we should just accept that?
Doesn't matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don't use any service whatsoever.
Looks like there's a viable alternative here.
Really? Who are you going to sue here? And how much money do you think you can sue them for?
Oh no, there's no money or profit motive here. I guess that's terrible.
That's not what I asked.
I don't think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there's a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it's just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can't, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
Well I know someone tried it against Valve and they ended up removing the requirement.