It kind of blows my mind that forced arbitration is legal at all.
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I think in the case of forced agreements (both Roku not having a way to select disagree and disabling all hardware functionality until you agree, and blizzard not allowing login to existing games including non-live service ones) no reasonable court should be viewing this as freely accepting the new conditions.
If you buy a new game with those conditions, sure you should be able to get a full refund though, and you could argue it for ongoing live service games where you pay monthly that it's acceptable to change the conditions with some notice ahead of time. If you don't accept you can no longer use the ongoing paid for features, I expect a court would allow that. But there's no real justification for disabling hardware you already own or disabling single player games you already paid for in full.
It'll be interesting to see any test cases that come from these examples.
I see 1 class action where the consumers get screwed and the company gets a slap on the wrist
The problem here is "reasonable court." One party in the US has spent decades stacking the courts with unreasonable judges who will agree to anything a corporation hands them.
I think you are correct. A contract requires "consideration." You got nothing for agreeing to the new contract, so I don't think it is legal.
Somone said that it isn't and isn't enforceable to but no-one has the time money or will to fuck around with that.
Depends on the country. This wiki article goes over a bunch of countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_clause
The governments all around the world are probably in favor of it, because their big “donors” want it and it lowers costs for the judicial system for them. It’s a win-win from their perspective.
"Maybe if Activision gets bought by Microsoft, Blizzard won't be as scummy."
Hahaha, nope.
Between the company rape culture and enabling internet & gambling addiction, Blizzard is dead to me.
Support your local private servers.
Have you found any good private server sublemmies? Whatever we're calling them?
Communities.
First Roku did a quick force TOS change before a beach disclosure, now Blizzard is mysteriously forcing a change to their TOS. I have no idea what's coming next. Seems like it's going to become part of the breach playbook to minimize financial loss. Maybe there will be a law against it in... oh...15 years?
So i'm not a lawyer but isn't there a law for unconsciability, When a contract is so one-sided, it's obvious that me the signer has absolutely no rights.The entire contract is voided.
EULAs and TOSes are as legally binding as a secondhand piece of toiletpaper with a contract written in shit. Almost every single one will be thrown out in court. The problem is getting to that point in the first place, and incurring the (time, effort & money) costs while enduring. Most common people can't afford that, which the companies know, so they keep making unenforceable EULAs.
That is true in US. In EU litigations cost are way lower and a single person could sue, win and not be financially broken.
Problem is only that in any case what you pay for a lawyer is more than you win, so it make no sense to sue in any case.
Almost like the Legal system is intentionally designed such that the wealthy are the only ones with any actual access.
Let me laugh if Blizzard's TOS change is because of a security breach they haven't disclosed yet.
If I don't own the product after purchase, the button shouldn't say "buy/purchase" it should say "rent".
That’s the hilarious(ly depressing) thing about buying a digital movie, for example, to me.
If you rent it, you get it for a certain amount of time.
If you ‘buy’ it, you also rent it, just for an undisclosed amount of time that they may or may not retroactively take away from you at any point with no warning or compensation.
Your use of the Platform is licensed, not sold, to you, and you hereby acknowledge that no title or ownership with respect to the Platform or the Games is being transferred or assigned and this Agreement should not be construed as a sale of any rights.
From the Blizz terms.
WoW has always revolved around having a server handle everything and your client is just the textures/models viewer where you tell the server what to do, I have been fine with this. But I do agree, it should say something else on the button. Other games that are not MMO shouldn't be a "license" to play. If you buy it, you can play it whenever and wherever. Features that are not multiplayer should work regardless. Some things just shouldn't be tied to a server. I really despise modern gaming because of this.
Anecdotal experience: Gran Turismo Sport recently lost its servers. When they went down, the Mileage Exchange shop went with it. This means all the cosmetics for cars. and a few unique cars, are now unobtainable for future players. PD could have patched the shop to be a complete list of everything and you buy it with the plethora of points you will collect in the future as you race. But no, they didn't.
Fuck Blizzard. Haven't used them since the censorship bullshit they pulled over Hong Kong.
At that point I tried to delete my account, but they made it impossible already. So they are "lucky" to "keep me" as a "customer"
This is not unique to Blizzard, and has nothing to do with their latest EULA changes. Binding arbitration has been part of their EULA for years, long before the latest one arrived. (The earliest copy I've found is from 2018, and I don't think it was new even then.)
For reference, here's a diff showing the latest changes:
https://rentry.co/yuu78kqd
Both that and the unilateral changing of terms post-sale are horrible practices that we should all pressure our legislators to make illegal, and perhaps reject by voting with our wallets, but singling out one company for it takes attention away from the larger issue: It has been widespread in the software industry for a long time.
If EULAs are going to be legally binding, there should really be some standard mechanism, an API, on systems to display one such that the system can record a copy and you can see differences and such. Otherwise, you're entering into a contract with some random party and only they have a copy or and see what changed across versions.
If such a display API is available on a given platform and isn't used, could simply make the EULA automatically non-binding.
I'm willing to believe that there are legitimately cases where one does need license agreements to fix issues that extend beyond standard consumer law, but the current situation is simply a dumpster fire. Also, some EULAs have been held unenforceable, so even from the standpoint of the software company, it's a mess as to whether their license is actually going to stand up; there are no clear lines to which a lawyer can conform to make their license hold up.
Some other possible tweaks:
-
Require that prior to sale, existence of a EULA be prominently disclosed and be readable.
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I personally would much rather have industry adopting standard licenses than having every company creating ad-hoc licenses. Like, in the open-source world, the GPL and MIT licenses deal with a number of problems that open source software runs into, and I can learn once what each entails and quit looking at it. I'd rather have there be agreements for commercial software that work the same way. If industry needs flexibility, I think that it's reasonable to say that they don't all need to custom-craft solutions. I'd rather like legislation that encourages industry use of a limited number of widely-used agreements rather than hand-crafting them. Maybe add some kind of tax on non-standard EULAs, dunno.
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Disallow change-without-notice as a EULA condition; there should be no legitimate reason for this. If you got agreement once, you can get it again. Require that any change notice also provide a way to see the "delta" between the old license and the new license, just the changes.
Hopefully the lesson people are slowly learning is to walk away from these systems.
It's not that easy. My Blizzard account is over 10 years old - never thought they'd go down hill so much. What's the solution, to never create accounts online anywhere? Even if a service looks good and you support it, a corporation like Activision can come along and have their asshole CEO infect everything.
Walking away from my account now means throwing away a lot of money spent on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
a sunk cost is a sum paid in the past that is no longer relevant to decisions about the future.
So due to sunk cost the better choice is to continue supporting bad behavior?
For me, not continue to support but use what I've paid for and not put any more money into it
I played Vanilla WoW a week after launch and was with it all the way up through ~~Cataclysm~~ Mists. After hearing about the multiple shocking incidences of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Blizzard and upper management's unwillingness to stop it, it was quite easy to delete my Battle.net account and walk away. (Yeah I hadn't played in a while, but I'd intended to come back eventually.)
There are plenty of other games out there. You vote with your dollars, and your vote shows your character.
The funny thing is by forcing you to agree to the new terms, the contract can be challenged since one side was coerced to sign it (and didn't get a chance to sign in voluntarily!).
US courts tend to favor corporations over end users, so there's still a strong chance a judge will throw the case out anyway, but because this is such an act of bad faith in US contract law, a judge might also rule in the end-user's favor just to make an example out of Blizzard for being such a dick.
PS: Steam did this a long time ago. I've never had any disagreements with Steam but some folks have. I don't know if anyone's had the account bricked, which Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft have done.
I understand why Louis likes privacy.com so much. But he really needs to stop telling people to use them as a means of stopping payment with scummy vendors and companies so frivolously without having a disclaimer that it can open that person up to getting their credit dinged for non-payment.
Maybe he doesn't care about such things, but his viewers might.
To get around the Blizzard dark pattern the "right way", agree to the EULA, login, cancel subscriptions, remove payment details, close account (if possible), stop using Battle.net, done. Now the EULA is irrelevant. This also has the knock on effect of being the path that Blizzard/Activision/MS will actually notice since it will cost them money at scale in a way they can't explain away as childish internet trolling.
Edit: a word (irreverent > irrelevant)
This seems to be the new norm, first Roku, now Blizzard.
I have less reasons to feel bad about pirating everything day by day
How can they "force" anything if you dont sign? By not agreeing to new terms.. you dont agree to the terms. Wouldnt having it any other way just be insanity? Like i could write "contract" here that by viewing it you agree to it and if you dont agree, i could still claim that some part of it applies because it reads so in the contract. Or I have some other contract that is agreeable and someone signs it, then I change the terms and other party can't reject them all because of something in the first contract.
Internet companies usually have clauses that they can terminate the agreement at any time for any reason, including "because they feel like it". They usually don't have to tell you why, either.
Same deal with all the "licensing" things and "digital goods ownership". In two words: you don't.
But it's been that way for ages.
Especially if it's something free or subscription based. It's just a "our rules have changed, if you don't like it stop using it/paying for it"
It's get very dodgy when it's a physical thing you've bought like that Roku agreement a few weeks back, but I doubt they'll let that stop them.
As my lawyer used to tell me, "there is the contract and there is the law." Meaning anyone can say anything in a contract. If you have the legal ability you can find out what the law says about it.
This doesn't affect me, because I stopped buying Blizzard's shit games after the BnetD lawsuit.
k, I'll continue to not ever buy their games
hopefully a class action lawsuit in the making. i wouldnt think doing this would hold up in court would it? INAL tho
Common Blizzard L