Can an 8-year-old waive their rights to sue a company by clicking a box?
That’s the stance of Roblox, an online gaming platform that bills itself as a digital playground.
The argument comes as the $41-billion company is embroiled in a lawsuit with the family of a Northern Kentucky child whose death by suicide, her mother says, is related to use of the platform.
“Waiving of rights” should be automatically null and void if it happens only as part of some TOS (or GTC or similar situations).
There needs to be strict scrutiny applied by courts to TOS. And other similar legal terms (ask a lawyer what they are, not me) which all say basically only the obvious things that shouldn’t need to be stated at all can be put in them.
If you need more than the basic protection the law already provides for you, then you don’t use a TOS, you need a real contract signed by both parties, with both parties having a lawyer on hand to ensure the terms are understood and really agreeable.
There should be standard TOS clauses that are approved based on their legality and enforceability that click or use based “contracts” should be limited to. Or at the very least, they should need to be legally ratified rather than only looked at closely if legally challenged.
Like that whole “you waived our liability for real world shit by using Disney+” should have resulted in the disbarment of any lawyers that wrote, approved, and tried to argue it in court when it came up and punitive damages to Disney for even trying.
I’m still pissed off about that. The guy’s wife fucking died and they pulled that shit.
But this was not in court: Disney was trying to force the surviving husband into arbitration and simply withdrew the objection to trial after it got a lot of bad publicity, so it was never heard in front of a judge. Disney never actually said it did not have absolute right to arbitration, it just withdrew the objection, meaning that they could do it again at any time.
And the whole “try but back down if it isn’t going so well” strategy is the worst part of it all because it helps them without even if a judge would laugh them out of court over it because of the set of people that would back down or be happy with a lesser settlement, which is probably larger than the set of people that would fight it anyways, plus there’s the subset of people that would want to fight anyways but don’t have the resources to do so.
That’s why I hate the whole system of “treat it as if it is all good until someone (who was specifically harmed by this) takes it to court”. And that’s even before getting to the part where the decision in the end rests in the hands of a single or maybe a small group of judges.