https://docs.roku.com/published/disputeresolution/en/us
The new terms are obviously skewed entirely in Roku's favor. They say that consumers can't sue Roku in court and can't participate in class-action lawsuits.
You can opt-out, a detail they conveniently omitted in the notification email, but it has to be in writing within 30 days.
It irritates me that Roku and other corporations are allowed to force millions of customers into spending an hour or so to read these new terms and send a letter in the mail.
Are there things that I can do as a consumer to fight back against this bad behavior by Roku? In the long term, I'll support candidates and federal bills that make forced arbitration illegal, but in the short term, what can I do to discourage this behavior by Roku and other companies?
Sometimes there is a way to fight back by having a single law firm file a lot of individual arbitrations based on similar facts and circumstances, yielding an approximation of a class action lawsuit that's more annoying and potentially more expensive for the company. But Roku seems to have crafted their terms to close that workaround.
The only real way to get out from this right now, beyond leveraging any opt-out procedures you have the energy to follow to the letter, is to move to places outside the US where consumer protection laws make this illegal in the consumer context. For example, many European countries or certain Canadian provinces like Quebec. And even that wouldn't help usage that doesn't fall within the scope of the applicable consumer protection law, such as a product or service which you primarily use in a professional context.
If you have cash, public suits are great. You have a chance at setting precedent, get to make a PR splash and generally troll and embarass your opponent. If you don't have six+ figures of liquidity lying around, however, and your opponent does--and they know it--you're toast. They'll file for extraneous motions, launch counter-discovery: anything to rack up the legal bills. In most cases, it doesn't even advance that far. The motions and countersuits were disclosed, plaintiff's law firm asked their client for a six-figure retainer, client couldn't afford it and the issue went away. (With the client a few thousand, or tens of thousand, out of pocket or in debt, depending on whether they advanced from dicussing with counsel to hiring a litigator.)
Forced arbitration in cases of possible crimes, e.g. sexual harassment at the workplace or poisonous products, are a sham. They should be outlawed. But in cases of commercial contract disputes, they're--in my experience--a levelling agent for the little guy. The only people who seem to publicly launch missives against them are class-action attorneys (unsurprisingly, one of the most PR-savvy collections of counsel).
Maybe the middle ground is permitting a class exception to mandatory arbitration. But there is a reason large companies are removing arbitration as something you can force them into [1], largely in reaction to mass arbitration, which delivers arbitration's low-cost analogy to litigation in respect of class actions.
[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/amazon-drops-arbitra...
If you're pissed enough, consider doing that :) The whole thing cost me probably about $50 in certified mail postage and domain registration but it was fun to stick it to them.
https://docs.roku.com/published/disputeresolution/en/us
For legal correspondence only, please contact: Stephen Kay Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Roku, Inc. 1701 Junction Court, Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95112 generalcounsel@roku.com Phone number: 408-556-9391 Fax number: 408-364-1260
Workaround Hard Reset. Won't let you use your Internet connection unless you register your email. Which requires you agreeing to new terms. Only works if you HDMI to another Device. We have it hooked up to our Desktop Computer VIA HDMI. It is now a Giant Monitor
"However, in January 2020, Scientology convinced Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Burdge Jr. that because Haney signed her exit agreement on that day in 2017 with the attorney Gary Soter and the armed security guard watching her, she was obliged by that contract not to sue the church but to submit to its own brand of internal “religious arbitration.”"
" Haney testified that she was astonished to see someone she considered one of her “abusers” (as her attorneys described her in the Status Conference Report filed in her lawsuit) to be on the panel that would supposedly judge her claims fairly ."
- the entire vibe of the Roku content ecosystem is a Venn diagram of "right-wing fever dream" meets shovelware
- the developer experience (language, API, tooling) is like an alt-history where ASP, XML and DRM-for-everything won
- there is a distinct two-tier class system where big players can write native executables in something C-like, but everyone else needs to use a slow, interpreted template script thing
- it's basically impossible to create something that can be discovered without pouring a lot of money into platform ads
I encourage anyone still reading to fight back by not buying Roku-enabled products.