Paddin said:
[Hmm, an interesting argument, I've never really thought about it that way. I would still say that some court cases, such as Lieback v. McDonald's Restaurants where a woman was awarded $2.86million for spilling hot coffee on herself. The cost was lowered to $640,000, but it is ridiculous in the sense that she spilled the coffee on herself, and McDonald's had to pay for it. Applying your argument to it, it did have a long term effect as McDonald's now serve their coffee at a much lower temperature, and so I can see what you mean by the principle of the case.
However, I still do not agree with America's constant frivolous litigation, where because there wasn't a warning on the box that, for example, you cannot eat an iPod, a man who ate an iPod holds Apple responsible for the damages caused. And the after-effect is ridiculous and overreactive.
Or, for another example, a man gets banned from PSN and sues $55,000 because it restricts his right to exercise free speech.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93314-Agoraphobic-PS3-Owner-Sues-Sony-over-PSN-Ban
Your argument has opened my eyes to why such large amounts of money are demanded through lawsuits, but I still feel that the reasons behind most of these large lawsuits are ridiculous and are just an attempt to gain money through their own faults.
Well, in many cases there suits aren't as ridiculous as they first seem. For example in the infamous "Mcdonalds Coffee spilling Incident" there was a legitimate problem here. The case wasn't just that she spilled the coffee, or even that she was burned, but that the coffee was so hot that it burned her so badly that she needed skin grafts.
Civil cases allow for there to be partial liability, this is how on an appeal the amount she was awarded was lowered. It can be argued that it's her fault for being a klutz to an extent, but by the same token there is absolutly no reasonable excuse for the coffee being hot enough to do that much damage. If she had drank that coffee she probably would have died according to most accounts.
In the final equasion (as I understood it) she got her medical bills paid off, some money for her pain and suffering, and Mcdonalds wound up becoming more responsible about keeping their beverages at a reasonable temperature.
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In the case of the shut-in going up against Sony, well that guy is insane, early on I agreed with him, but he started extending his lawsuits into all kinds of crazy areas and it just got stupid. I believe at one point he said that he was inspired by "Mortal Kombat Vs. Dc Universe" and wanted to wear a purple suit into court like The Joker and represent himself.
Getting past his personal craziness, he does have a valid point, modern game consoles are very expensive pieces of machinery, and one of their big features to justify that price is that they can go online. Not only that, but going online is increasingly becoming nessicary to get full functionality out of these machines.
Right now there is nobody really watchdogging companies like Microsoft or Sony to hold them to any kind of standards as to when they can and cannot ban someone. As the whole "Itzlupo vs. The Pro" thing demonostrated, The Pro was right in what he did, but there was a valid point made that in theory some of these "online policemen" could go out of control on a power trip and ban people without any real justification. Who is to say when this shut in was banned that there was any real justification for it. What's more there are already issues (albiet in their infancy) about private censorship, at least as it applies to the USA. An arguement being made that with almost all communications platforms being privatly owned, it gives citizens powers that not even the goverment posseses to limit the speech of other citizens. I expect the concept of "the banhammer" in general to be one of the central issues that will be being debated over the next decade or so.
At any rate, some guy bans you off of something like PSN, and it costs you $300 or more for all intents and purposes. He isn't held to any kind of standard to prove that complaints against you exist to any kind of actual authority, and really you have no viable court of appeal in such matters. For the most part businesses trust their mods and there rarely seems to be any kind of review involved. Some of the power trips that have resulted in the bans of dozens of people in guilds and such on MMORPGs are a related example, and very similar.
The point I'm making here is that there is some validity to that case. Even when a ban is temporary it prevents you from using a product that you paid good money for. When it comes to standards of conduct there are serious questions about whether or not such things are being adequetly explained BEFORE you pay money for a product, not to mention the fact that in the end it mostly comes down to the word of one guy, against the word of another. You'll find in a lot of cases when a mod claims "there have been tons of complaints before this" he rarely provides proof of those complaints.
While it's NOT a court of law, the right to face your accuser is also a key element. I mean if your playing online and all the members of a rival guild or clan decide to complain about you due to the competition you provide, that could render dozens of complaints extremely dubious by their very nature. However rarely are the people making the complaints even revealed.
As I said, it's a touchy subject because all of this takes place on private platforms which is how it's gotten away with. On a fundemental level the guy your paying for an item or service has the right to deprive you of it at will, with only the weakest justifications. Heck, in most cases it's not even the business in question but a low end employee.
Before he went totally off the deep end I kind of saw this as a legitimate free speech issue, and was kind of hoping it would have gone to court in a sane format. I think we'll see cases akin to this becoming more prevelant despite the handfull of rulings we've seen so far, because really it's a very touchy issue.
