Comment by amluto
16 hours ago
IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
The general mechanism is lawsuits; in this case class action lawsuits.
And this mechanism is pretty ineffective.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.
Right. And IMO it works poorly. It’s extremely common to see a settlement such that the company still ends up ahead on its problematic behavior.
The Office 2024 license quoted in comment [1] says that "class action lawsuits ... aren't allowed" (but only if you live in US). Truly free country where you a free to even waive your right to sue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341968
Another option is to actually take them to arbitration. There are starting to be law firms that specialize in mass-filing multiple arbitration suits instead of class actions and they are pretty interesting because some companies are finding it more difficult to deal with than class action lawsuits.
That said, EULAs are also often written in ways that are unenforceable. Just because a company says they get something doesn’t mean the law agrees.
Does the judge in my small claims case give a shit about the EULA if the defendant fails to show up?
> Truly free country where you a free to even waive your right to sue.
Yep. It's difficult to say that the folks in the country are free when they often have to surrender their right to access the courts to get jobs, health insurance, medical care, access to telecommunications, shelter, delivery services, bill-payment services, etc, etc, etc, and obligate themselves to arbitration that nearly always gags both parties.
AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion was a monstrous decision. Arbitration was always an option. If you have to force people to choose the dispute resolution option you claim is cheaper [0] and fairer, odds are good that it's neither of those things.
[0] Remember when -IIRC- Doordash plead with Federal court to permit it to move its mass arbitration into court because the arbitration was too expensive (and how they got their ass kicked out of court)? Remember how like a month later, all the arbitration companies magically got a "We will handle no more than twenty complaining parties at once. All yall bitches got to get in line." clause in their rules governing mass arbitration? Yea, "good" times.
Not even as a deterrence?
Go find some class action settlements. There’s a good chance the total damages (substantially) less than the profits from whatever behavior generated the lawsuit, and that’s not even accounting for interest.
So, no.
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