The bug in the legal system is that by filing this motion/claim, Disney can only win.
In the unlikely best case, they get the case dismissed, but even in the most likely case that the motion is denied, they win by wearing down their opponent who has much more limited resources and is personally affected by the case dragging out, i.e. more likely to accept a (lower) settlement than without this tactic. The only downside is a tiny bit of legal costs.
Courts should be able to issue sanctions/extra damages for the use of such tactics. If using such a tactic turned the claim from "you killed this person negligently" to "you killed this person negligently, then willfully tried sleazy tricks to create additional suffering for the husband", and had the potential to double the award, companies would be much less eager to play this game.
In general I agree, except perhaps "Disney can only win.". They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss.
Their service is hospitality and the message they're sending here is very much inhospitable. It might turn into a meme, like "Cancel your Disney+ before visiting Disney IRL". It might make people hesitate and/or choose a different holiday destination. Etc.
When has that ever happened? I can't think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.
>When has that ever happened? I can't think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.
Exactly. VW shortened the lifespan of millions of Europeans with their Diesel gate and their finances are still solid. Ikea and Oil companies destroy the environment all the time and saw no financial hit from the PR issues. Nike, Apple and other major manufacturers are known to have used sweatshop labor and also saw no financial consequences.
Consumers just don't seem to care enough about the PR of $COMPANY as long as their contempt with how the $PRODUCT they bought works and serves them well.
Thats a bit of an over the top way of saying it!
We could stand to do a bit more raising of the profile of the externalities of such events.
The emissions regulations that VW was cheating to get around exist for the purpose of improving air quality. The improved air quality leads to less air quality induced health problems. Which in turn leads to longer, higher quality lives for people in Europe.
VW wasn't going around and directly pouring vials of poison into people's food like some kind of cartoon villain. But they absolutely were intentionally lying about the emissions of their vehicles, and those emissions absolutely have impacts to human health.
Its fair to say that VW intentially pushed the emissions of their vehicles over the recomended limit, which potentially affects the health of millions of people.
Saying VW directly shortened the lifespan of millions is just Hyperbole.
It's simply extending the line to the obvious next dot. It gets more uncomfortable to think about so we often don't want to, but what exactly do you think is the eventual outcome of those effects on the health of millions of people?
Think of the many factors that combine to determine when someone dies of "old age" or "natural causes". Think of the extra effort millions of bodies have spent dealing with the pollutants directly and the effects those pollutants have on those bodies.
Someone in VW's position could say, "well our pollutants were one cause among many" for any specific death. But they were part of the math. They contributed a share and lied about the size of it. They did indeed contribute to shortening the lifespan of millions of Europeans.
Before the phrase was 'VW shortened the lifespan of millions'.
Now after my posts you have changed that to 'They did indeed contribute to shortening the lifespan of millions'
They are in no way the same sentences. Your second one agrees with my point, your first one doesnt.
Yes, they contributed, definitely. Did they directly cause a shortening of peoples lives, no they didnt.
LMAO what? Those sentences are pretty equivalent.
Take a piece of string and send it around a group of people. Tell each of them to cut a bit of the string off. Each person in the group has now participated in the shortening of the string. You can, completely accurately and honestly, say both of these sentences:
"Person 1 shortened the length of the string."
"Person 1 contributed to shortening the length of the string."
These statements are not in any way in conflict. You're creating a meaningless difference then insisting that I index on that difference. I refuse to play that game.
OK, lets take it apart then.
You seem to be playing it pretty well from where Im standing!
Looking back on my post, I havent insisted anything. I didnt even ask you anything. I just clarified my point.
It was your choice to retort.
Why do you insist on trying to reduce my opinion, which you do not understand, into metaphors which have no relevance?
This statement implies a direct influence, ie Person 1 cut or broke the string, therefore directly shortened it.
This statement is much more vague. What part did person 1 contribute? Did they make the scissors which cut the string? Did they mine the metal for thoise scissors? Did they hypnotise or manipulate the will of the person who did actually cut the string?
There is nuance here, and you dont seem to be understanding it at all.
Which part are you saying wasn't direct? The VW->emissions step, or the emissions->life shortening step?
I could understand arguing the first one, but I think the subterfuge makes it pretty much a direct action of VW.
I don't think there's a reasonable argument that the emissions didn't directly shorten lives, even if you think the precise number is impossible to calculate.
From your post above it sounds like you're arguing the emissions->life shortening step, and you haven't really given a good explanation why.
Its neither, I am questioning 'WV->Life Shortening' which some people seem to be insisting has happened. When you miss out the middle step, it becomes a different beast.
So you agree that VW directly caused the emissions, and the emissions directly caused the life shortening, you just think the combination shouldn't use the word "direct"?
Then I think you're in a pointless semantic argument rather than making a distinction about the real world.
That's your own interpretation. Neither phrasing specifies the exact amount of contribution the subject had on the target. One phrasing is slightly more active in acknowledging that other contributions could exist, but still does not declare that other contributions must exist. The other phrasing does not preclude the potential of other things that also caused shortening.
It's all in your head, dude.
No its not. The dictionary definition of 'contribute' is 'help to cause or bring about'. Emphasis on the 'help'.
By definiton of the word 'contribute', yes it does.
No it isnt, by using the word 'contribute' you move the repsonsibility from directly being caused by that person, to being shared by multiple entites, each with different amounts of cause/blame. See the definition of 'contribute' above.
Why am I arguing language nuance with somebody who talks like this?!
>Saying VW directly shortened the lifespan of millions is just Hyperbole.
Why? What's the difference when the outcome is the same? Your malicious actions still lead to deaths.
"I didn't directly murder someone, I just didn't clean the radioactive residue form his house because that would have cost me time and money so now he's dead."
Its not the same though is it. In your example there can be a cause of death identified as radiation poising which can be attributed to the residue in his house.
With the VW example, you cant quantify it at all. How much has it shortened peoples lives? 2 seconds? 10 years? nanoseconds? Its not a direct correlation, theres no graph you can plot with emissions against length of life, and so claiming that there is a direct correlation is Hyperbole.
https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/NOx%20Health%20Fact%...
Sounds like the graphs do exist. (Obviously VW is only a fraction of those specific numbers.)
I really tried to give it a go, and accept what this link is trying to say.
But when you read it, literally everything used in creating those numbers is an estimation. Ther are no measurements whatsoever.
What point are you trying to make here? people pick the weirdest battles
Then why comment? Im just shooting the breeze with random opinions on a public forum. Isnt that what we are all doing?
We can argue about the extent of this contribution, and whether it was negligible, but not about if it actually happened.
(Unfortunately emissions are not the only culprit and a lot of particulate matter that has negative impact on overall population health in cities comes from brakes and tires but nobody figured a feasible way to deal with that yet.)
Fully agreed. Finally a sensible reply.
>Thats a bit of an over the top way of saying it!
Why? Excess of fine particulate matter in the air we breathe, like the one coming from diesel soot, does reduce life expectancy.
1) You can’t keep up with all of it.
2) There are substantial costs to avoiding all the brands known to be doing bad things, both in time and money, even if you could keep up with it.
3) Ok, so you’ve decided the cost to you and your family is worth it: congrats, your efforts harm you more than all these companies unless a whole bunch of other people do the same thing, and keep doing it (i.e. it’s a coordination problem)
There are reasons boycotts and such are all but entirely ineffective as a means of keeping megacorps in line, and it’s not really “consumers’” fault things are how they are. It’s structural.
Nestle regularly uses slave and child labor.
I don't pin this 100% on customers, because many people aren't informed and worse, it's often not just these single companies, it's all their major competitors doing exactly the same thing.
The issue is a lack of regulation and enforcement. We can't trust major companies to be good actors because capitalism does not reward honest actors. This is one purposes of government, to make the cost of being a bad actor high enough that companies behave.
Isnt Tesla taking a pretty big hit every time his lordship tweets something?
No? You're confusing short-term stock price fluctuations vs brand value and future sales.
Almost no one is picking a non-Tesla car because of the CEOs unrelated tweets.
The musk factor is starting to hurt them. I have friends who have told me they'd like a tesla but won't buy one because of Musk. I don't think they can name the CEO or senior leadership of another car brand.
That speaks volumes about your friends.
Yes it says they are probably good people.
All we know is this: They virtue signal that they want a product but don’t buy it because they’ve been conditioned to dislike the company’s CEO. It’s likely that their tribe has all been conditioned in this way so the virtue signaling would be well received and elicit social approval.
I don’t think that makes them good or bad people, per se. I’m not here to lay down a judgement. It is what it is.
According to you, when are they allowed to want an electric vehicle but not want a Tesla? Do they have to buy a Tesla no matter how much they dislike the thought of giving their money to someone they dislike?
It's disingenuous to lay down a judgement, then follow up with this. It is what it is.
Almost everyone does that level of virtue signalling, so it really says very little about their friends.
Yep, they're normal.
That he doesn't hold stock in Tesla or other Musk companies and doesn't want to be associated with Musk because of his opinions?
I do expect my next car to be electric but I have no interest in a Tesla. My distrust of Musk and the culture he appears to create at companies he runs is a big factor in that view.
I did
Crowdstrike lost 50% of their business valuation in a week due to bad PR recently.
Arguably Crowdstrike's loss was due to a flaw in their product rather than PR.
Disney's product (though not their core, I would argue) allegedly killed this poor woman - however it is the lawyers' behaviour, not the death itself, that is an additional PR liability for Disney; death from an allergy is tragic, but could have potentially happened at any restaurant in the country. Only Disney (and a select few other large corps) could pull this particular bad act in defence.
As an aside, the entire line of argument from Disney is an absurd legal fiction. No reasonable person reads terms and conditions, and so they should not be bound by the terms. I hold a weak hope that this case is bad PR for the practice as a whole that raises the profile of this injustice.
Disneys product did not kill this woman.
Disney own the mall, where a resturant chain rented a unit from them. The mall is free to enter and does not require buying a ticket from Disney. The 3rd party resturant hired the staff, made the menu, cooked the food and served the guests. Nothing to do with Disney at all.
The only part disney has in it is they published the restuarants menu on the malls website, which reads 'Allergen Free'.
This is the basis for the entire lawsuit.
And this should be their line of defense, not "but you clicked on a trial of a streaming service 5 years ago".
The general consensus is that to point out how absurd the claim is, you need to make an equally absurd counterclaim.
Bud light is a famous recent example. Of course, the company is large enough that it didn't make the company bankrupt, but it hurt them
It hurts my heart that all the examples above of companies hurting people or lying have very few consequences but bud light took a brand hit because they paid a trans person.
Not because they paid a trans person, but because they made them part of the marketing. A product mostly marketed to the very demographic that is transphobic. It’s not at all surprising this backfired.
Companies only started putting gay couples in commercials regularly years after gay marriage was legalized nationally.
Did you see Mulvaney's portrayal of "girlhood" though? Incredibly, ridiculously sexist. Let's not forget that the backlash against him has been for a variety of reasons, and one of them is his blatant misogyny.
It just have to affect enough to offset the cost of the lawsuit (which probably won't be much because they probably do have plenty of in-house lawyers) + the estimated cost of future lawsuits that might come their way if they appear to be "soft" and/or set precedence.
They just made the front page of the BBC News website. I think we can safely assume that a lot of people are going to hear about this one.
How many future lawsuits about allegedly killing someone by failing to properly take into account their medical conditions after repeated warnings are Disney going to face? If the answer is greater than zero then it seems they have bigger problems than whether they can move this particular legal action to arbitration.
Ratners is the famous example that springs to mind here in the UK.
I think the Bud light controversy did impact their sales significantly for a good while.
The widower asked for 50k, this negative PR is already worse for DIS than paying out the 50k.
Both sides can lose.
How is it losing to invest 100K to fight off a 50K lawsuit?
If they would lose easily, they'd get more lawsuits. They have to scare others off.
You mean if they killed your wife you wouldn't sue now, because you remember that you have tried out Disney+ once?
I don't think this scares anyone of suing Disney. If anything, it scares people away from visiting Disney restaurants and subscribing to Disney products.
If they keep killing people, I should hope they get more lawsuits!
But just think: if they pay this 50K, then the spouse of every person Disney kills is going to start asking for 50K.
Wow... I guess that would be a great deal of money.
That $50K figure wasn't mentioned in the article above. Where did you see it?
I'm surprised that the figure would be so low, both because wrongful death claims are usually 6- or 7-figure amounts, and also because she was a NYC doctor with much higher future earnings potential than the average person.
Edit: I see in a previous article on wdwnt.com that "Piccolo is seeking damages in excess of $50,000 under the Florida Wrongful Death Act." That doesn't mean, though, that he's seeking only $50K. I believe it means that he only needs to disclose at this point that the damages he's seeking are at least $50K, but could be much higher.
Yes, except this person DID cancel her Disney+. More accurately, she never signed up for it, merely ran a free trial for a month in 2019. So the only possible way to avoid this, if Disney's argument was upheld, would be to have never interacted with Disney at all in any way.
It's actually not even that. The person who died had the free trial, and now Disney is being sued by her husband - and her husband has never had a Disney+ trial or any other service with such an agreement with them. So like the article says - Disney is trying to anforce an agreement that this person(the husband ) has never signed.
Your point is correct, but you've got it backward.
It was the husband who signed up for the free trial and bought tickets to Epcot.
Yet he is suing not on his own behalf, but on behalf of her estate, and she never entered into any such agreement.
You can think of it this way: Disney wronged the woman who died. She is the one who is owed damages. But since she's dead, her estate is owed damages. Her husband is the administrator of her estate, and he is suing on its behalf. So whatever agreements he has entered into in his individual capacity are irrelevant. It would be like trying to force arbitration on someone because their lawyer had a Disney+ subscription. That doesn't mean that they themselves entered into an agreement with Disney.
Ah. Totally got it wrong then, thanks for explaining :-)
Yes, that is the PR risk. How much will Disney save in this one case, against the background meme of "if you ever watch anything Disney they are free to kill you" (that's not accurate, but memes rarely are).
IMO this is lawyers finding a local maximum that is bad for the company in general.
"Never interacting with Disney to begin with" is now a goal of mine.
I occasionally watch something on Disney+ with the kids, but it's been awhile and Netflix has been a much better value. This kind of bullying makes me even more likely to cancel.
As far as their parks go, I have been extremely disappointed in the past. Six Flags may be a gross dumpster, but it's at least got a bunch of cool rides and is much cheaper. I was blown away by the mediocrity and datedness of Disney World. It's hot and humid there with no shade in the park. Who wants to sit in the sun for an hour to wait for a ride that's okay at best. I may take my kid once just so they can have that experience, but I'll probably take them someplace much better for 1/4 the cost instead.
I get it that some people really enjoy the parks and movies though and that's fine (to each their own).
I would think Disney is too big. Not even 0.1% of all Disney fans will ever know.
A good portion of HN already knows. Disney+ is struggling as it is. Giving people one more reason not to sign up is not good marketing. Losing 0.1% market share in case of Disney is probably worth more than the whole lawsuit.
Didn’t they just start turning a profit, a year ahead of schedule?
Is this financial outlook posted anywhere digestible (ie not investor reports). I find it wild that it is not profitable.
Video streaming is not cheap, but at their scale, they can negotiate the best peering deals or setup edge boxes a la Netflix or YouTube. Then again, maybe it is their core audience which has a different usage pattern from adults. I might watch one show a night. A child might stream for 12 hours a day.
Unless Disney went on a spending spree and bought a big number of new movies+shows to publish on the platform, I am surprised. Disney bought Hulu- they could piggy back off of all that existing infrastructure.
It was a 1 month trial.
Not even using it.
"Disney claims Piccolo reportedly agreed to this in 2019 when signing up for a one-month free trial of the streaming service on his PlayStation console."
Contracts require an exchange of value. If I got a free trial I would argue they got nothing and so there is no agreement.
On the contrary, it seems extremely valuable to Disney to be able to force all disputes into individual binding arbitration rather than having to go through the courts.
On the third hand, it's debatable if anything on Disney+ is of any value either, so it could be argued that the deceased didn't get any value and isn't bound by the agreement.
(Yes, yes, I know that's not what you mean, nor is it what "value" means in a legal sense. IANAL, obviously)
Ah no, their argument is because she signed up for a one-month free trial of Disney+ in 2019, she agreed to arbitration for her death in 2023. So by their metric it doesn't matter if you cancel, you're still bound to that if you visit Disney IRL.
She didn’t even sign up. It was the husband who signed up.
Hoping that journalists pick up on cases like these and spread the word wide enough is... optimistic, to say the least.
A much better solution is to build incentives into the legal system, like tgsovlerkhgsel suggested. The problem isn't that bad actors abuse the system, the problem is that the system allows bad actors to abuse it.
And if you haven't, don't subscribe to this service as it can be used against you.
This post dramatically underestimates the tenacity of the US plaintiff's bar. Doubly so as of late given the rise of litigation funding.
Tbh I would love if they spun the motion into upping the damages in a nuclear verdict.
I would assume that lawyer companies might want to take this on without charging the person just because the potential upside of winning the lawsuit or settling it is so big. I agree with the general case that the legal system is really not accessible to everyone though ofc
I've got a hunch that the "bug in the legal system" is forced arbitration. I have zero actual experience here, but my general feeling is that arbitration rarely works out to the benefit of the plaintiff. Or, put another way, arbitration always benefits large corporations, like Disney. Is there any truth to that?
If an agreement is not consistent with the law, the law wins en the agreement is (partially or as a whole) void.
> The bug in the legal system is that by filing this motion/claim, Disney can...
For large corporations and rich individuals that are in the wrong, this isn't a bug of the US legal system. It's a feature.
Dragging the legal process through the courts for as long as possible -- typically, years -- is part of the standard playbook.
As you point out, the goal is to wear down -- and maybe exhaust the financial resources of -- the other party.
idk, to me it seems like no matter what this is a lose/lose situation for disney.
either way it's bad press, which granted doesn't mean much in the long run
assuming the motion to dismiss is denied and it moves forward, regardless of which way it is eventually ruled, doesn't this eventually open it up for federal courts to rule all forced arbitration agreements in T&C's void? (or more likely assuming they rule against disney, limit them to less severe crimes)
though that the widow is willing/able to move forward with appeals process, the latter of which likely won't be possible without some civil rights activists group stepping in to provide pro bono legal assistance
a settlement seems unlikely, since the widow only went forward with this case because Disney refused a 50k settlement, the cheap bastards. They are almost certainly spending more on lawyer fees than it would have cost them to settle this out of court
Judges are humans. Pissing them off from the outset isn’t costless.