I'm not a Playstation 3 owner, but what are everyone else's thoughts?

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/09/15/new-psn-agreement-prevents-users-from-filing-class-action-lawsuits-against-sony.aspx

Many companies have similar clauses. Mandatory arbitration, mandatory mediation, etc.

Nothing new here just corporations being evil,corrupt,greedy,etc. as always.

EDIT: Corporations are already untouchable with or without these agreements.

My general thought is that, while class action suits have been useful in the past to get recompense for systematic abuses by companies, the vast majority of them nowadays are obnoxious money grabs by opportunistic ambulance-chaser style lawyers. Like the "OMG, computer users everywhere have been terribly abused by your inaccurate claims of screen size! It's not 24 inches, it's really 23.2! We must sue you so that Justice Can Be Done! Every horribly abused customer in the class will get a certificate worth $4 off a new monitor, and we'll pocket $40mil. Justice!?"


I've gotten emails about three class actions in the past few years. ATI graphics cards a decade ago didn't actually support some rare graphics feature that most customers didn't even know about, we must obtain Justice? for the millions of customers who didn't get this claimed feature in the cards they bought; Classmates website gathered aggregate demographic data from their users (or something like that), we must obtain Justice? for this horrible invasion of privacy; and .... hmm, can't remember, but it was something similarly shallow and profiteering.


So yeah.... one class action in a hundred might actually be for something useful. The rest are just mercenary cashgrabs by sleazy lawyers. Nope, not really upset about this. :shrug:

That certainly can't be legal and if it is then Sony might have shot themselves in the foot bigtime and I can see Microsoft benefiting from this if Sony doesn't change the license agreement. This may not sound like a big deal but it is, What if you got legimate damages done by Sony such as them intentionally releasing your private data, under this contract you can't sue them for anything.

Apparently classmates.com doesn't, or at least didn't. I recently got an email stating that I was entitled to a settlement from a class action suit against said website, to the tune of $5.00... Show me the money!

And as far as SONY adding this clause to their user agreement, it's more shocking to me that it wasn't there from the get-go.

@ The Terror of Death. As much as you may want this to be the the proverbial straw that will send Microsoft to the top of the heap, think about some of the far more creepy things that Microsoft already has in place in their EULA... Wait, you did read the EULA when you agreed, right?

Indeed. Just because there are a lot of frivolous class-action lawsuits out there does not give Sony the right to do this. It's effectively saying "We can do what ever we want, and you can't do [censored] about it! Trolololololol"

I really hope this agreement gets shot down big time.

"Hey guys, so we might have accidentally leaked your credit card information to some hackers... tough luck."

It is legal, the way it works is you can't currently be a customer of Sony when you file the class-action lawsuit, so you must stop using any Sony service and then file it.

It's really popular with the mobile phone companies