AT&T Makes Its Terms of Service Even Worse, To Discourage Lawsuits 412
techmuse writes "AT&T has changed its terms of service (including for existing contracts) to prevent class action suits. Note that you are already required to submit your case to arbitration, a forum in which consumers are often at a substantial disadvantage. Now you must go up against AT&T alone." This post on David Farber's mailing list provides a bit of context as well.
Sounds like a great opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't they required to honour the original? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't they, as cosigners, required to honour the original contract?
Someone else wrote "great, now I can get out of my contract for free", but are you really required to rip up the contract you already have? That they won't renew the existing contract is fine, but ... telling you to rip the one you have up?
I'm fairly certain you couldn't do it the other way around.
"AT&T? Hi, I'm just calling you to tell you, that I've faxed over the new terms of our contract, stipulating that I get to spank your CEO in public every Saturday afternoon. You can either sign it or release me from my contract. Yours truly $name."
Somehow I think that'd just be ignored by AT&T and the courts alike.
EULAs (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey guys... (Score:4, Interesting)
How can requiring arbitration... (Score:3, Interesting)
there's a reasonable chance this is not enforcable (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty certain this has been the case for ages (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is, the morons who are only going with AT&T because they simply MUST have an iPhone are the same type of idiots who won't read their bills, much less the contract before signing it. Did you know that if you call AT&T to complain about minute overages and data use charges, your service can be terminated without notice, immediately? I can assure you that it won't unless you start making threats over the phone, but it's in the damn contract, in which the only fine print is the names of the cities on the coverage map.
Re:EULAs (Score:1, Interesting)
EULA's aren't legally binding. They aren't even valid. Once you buy the software from the store, you are given the right to do nearly anything with it, including open up the shrinkwrap. You don't need to ask the shrink wrap for permission to open it. Even if it says, "by opening this package, you agree to...", you don't actually have to agree to that to open it. You already have the right to open it.
As for clickwrap licenses, those are invalid, because, in acquiring the software, you acquired the right to click on any button in the software. In return for clicking on the "accept" button, you don't owe the software manufacturer anything other than the money you already paid for the software. You certainly don't owe them your acceptance of the EULA.
Furthermore, You can always hack the installer to show a different EULA, such as, "This program is in the public domain.". You haven't agreed not to reverse engineer it yet, so you still have that right. And, in exercising it, you can avoid ever losing it.
For internet forms, I'm not sure if you can click on the "By clicking here, I agree to the TOS" checkbox without legally being bound to it. However, if it only says by clicking there, then you can use tab and spacebar (or javascript) to manipulate the controls to check the box without clicking it.
Re:Hey guys... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Free Market Punishes Consumers Again (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a great reason for public-owned internet services. Once they get monopoly power, you feel the business end of their business.
Re:The Free Market Punishes Consumers Again (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a free market. There are government controls that prevent it from being a free market, like allowing people/corporations to own certain frequencies of radio waves.
Re:Torn. (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the alternative? To let companies get away with violations of the law until the DOJ gets around to prosecuting them?
We all benefit when antisocial corporate actions are discouraged, even if we're not all made whole. Your argument is actually a reason for better class-action procedures, not a reason to dismiss the entire concept.
Re:Sounds like a great opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time people were having bogus charges taken out of their accounts, we'll say $100, and because you couldn't form a class action it wasn't worth the money to sue them independently.
Some people did get together and sue them over not being able to form a class action and it was ruled that their TOS weren't fair or some such.
I could go dig through my old Cyberlaw book if anyone is interested but I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head.
Re: phirst post! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
Middle ground? The middle group between 'okay' and 'horrible' isn't 'good'. You have a point in the abstract. But right now, entrenched interests have far too much power to worry about whether we're being too hard on them.
Re:Only in a thoroughly corrupt society (Score:5, Interesting)
This will not hold water in the courts. Don't panic.
Probably not. The problem is that it raises the bar, and makes it that much harder to actually get to court. I presume that's the whole idea.
Right. A few years ago when my wife sued PayPal to recover $1200 they stole from her, the judge threw it out both on grounds of wrong jurisdiction and that the PayPal contract says they can't be sued. The fact that PayPal just flat took the money and repeatedly lied about even having it, did not outweigh the fine print in the PayPal user agreement in the mind of that particular judge. (This was back before eBay bought PayPal, and their internal policies may have been more corrupt then.) Fortunately, PayPal did promptly give the money back (with no explanation) when a state Attorney General inquired about the case. So the system isn't completely broken, and the outcome was right. And at least the lawsuit forced PayPal to pay a lawyer for a few hours to show up in court. But the point is the bogus clause in the user agreement did stop the lawsuit in this case. (The jurisdiction question was a separate issue - there was some contradictory guidance about what state to sue in since the theft occurred online.)
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
Does that Act still apply even if the contract contains a clause allowing one party to change the contract at will? In other words, what if the contract contains language allowing for its own mutability.
Re:Only in a thoroughly corrupt society (Score:3, Interesting)
That depends on the state. I know New York allows this.
Re:Nothing beats the government (Score:2, Interesting)
You are getting off-topic. The reason I posted this example was to preemptively counter inevitable lamentations, how "unfettered capitalism" (of AT&T) is bad, and how "public policy needs to protect private business from its own excesses" (quote from Barney Frank — "my" congressman).
This uncontested absurdity of yesterday is already an acceptable slogan of today. Accepted "by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other — until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology," — to continue Ayn's Rand's quotation [thinkexist.com].
So, here was the example of the government agency being the worst offender — by far... And yet, people want to keep trying — be it health-care (woa-woa, flamebait!), car-making, or cellular service provision, why do the idiots think, that getting the government take over an industry is going to improve anything?
Re:"Pray I do not alter it any further ..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Send in a notice with your next payment of your bill, that you've revised the contract additionally, and include provisions that the next time they change the contract, they owe you all payments previously remitted on your part, or something equally absurd. Make sure that you include that acceptance of payment constitutes agreement to the new terms and conditions. If they would like to cancel your account that they have 15 days to notify you of that cancelation of the account, and you are not liable for the terms of the previous contract, since they started renegotiations of the terms of the contract.
ALL it takes is being able to play the same stupid games they play, only play them better.
Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)
It is actually a critical and fundamental pillar of capitalism that the participants be well informed (read Friedman and others). Academically, if the consumer is so bogged down in misinformation or overinformation that they are not well informed than the assumptions that allow capitalism to work so well break down - and the results can no longer be considered the product of a capitalistic market.
Re:Hey guys... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't speak to any other state than MA and even then only as a self-researcher.
There are many occurrences in our laws of the phrase, "... held to be against public policy and void ...," and I can't imagine that a non-sue clause would hold water here.
One might even cite as precedent, the very specific law that bans such clauses in Landlord-Tenant cases.
Re:Again, only in america. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you.
Andrew jackson and Woodrow Wilson would be turning in their graves, while JP Morgan would be clapping.
In India, the reserve bank forced banks to cross-accept debit cards in their ATMs without surcharges. Naturally banks balked at this, but the reserve bank simply bulldozed over them. Now i can use any bank's card on ANY ATM without any surcharge. What's more the Reserve bank has forced them to put this on display in all of their ATMs.
Secondly, the local telephone companies wanted the ability to trash a consumer's credit score based on his telephone bill payment. The courts refused it.
Indian laws specifically make the corporate veil invisible in many criminal cases. So there are no "settlements" here. The CEO is prosecuted and jailed. No golden parachute crap, no evading responsibility.
My contract with my 16Mbps broadband provider specifically states that for every day the service is out, the company prorates the rental amount and credits my account with the money. Similarly iam free to use torrents, or any other crap. No restrictions.
if the speed goes below 12Mbps, the company of forced to charge me only for that plan rates.
Of course the company didn't like these terms: tough luck. The LAW and courts included this clause by force.
Preventing access to courts by arbitration is prohibited by law. Our Supreme court once thundered against this and put the CEO in jail for this.
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that "winner" has multiple definitions, and not all of them are nice.
Unfettered by any law, the "winner" is usually chosen by the law of the jungle. They're usually the guys with the largest body count, and, generally speaking, they're not nice people. It's not really all that good for society to have them be the "winner", and it's sure as hell not good for the people who are the "loser", which in all reality is the vast majority of us.
This leaves us wanting to change the winner. Now you've really only got two ways to change the winner. Either you remove the current winner from the game and let the game pick another winner, who will basically be the same as the previous winner, OR you change the rules.
Those of us who favor more regulation basically want to change the rules so we can change the winner. Sometimes when people want to do that it's because they want the winner to be themselves, but sometimes it's because they want a situation wherein the winner doesn't make the losers life so terrible.
That's what civilization is really about, trying to control who wins so that the people who lose don't lose as badly. Despite what everyone tends to believe, the average person has far more power today than they have ever had in the entire history of our species. It's not uniform throughout the world, but it's certainly better overall pretty much everywhere.
The reason people think that this is not the case is that, because the average person covers a lot more kinds of people than it used to, they personally have less power. If you are an educated, white, western male, you have less power than you did 50 years ago, because we're sharing that power with a lot more people than you used to have to share it with. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)