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.
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.