Wow. Disney is being sued by a man whose wife died from a reaction to severe food allergies at EPCOT. Disney’s lawyers have come up with a creative defense: the $50,000 lawsuit should be dismissed because the plaintiff, Jeffrey Piccolo, signed up for a one-month trial of the streaming service Disney+ in 2019. The deal’s fine print requires Disney+ trial users to submit “all disputes” with the company to arbitration. This, the theory goes, extends to attempts to sue Disney for matters having nothing to do with the streaming service.
Piccolo’s lawyer called Disney’s argument “preposterous” in court filings and said that the idea that signing up for a Disney+ free trial should bar a customer’s right to a jury trial “with any Disney affiliate or subsidiary, is so outrageously unreasonable and unfair as to shock the judicial conscience.” He accused the entertainment giant of seeking to block its 150 million Disney+ subscribers from ever bringing a wrongful death case against it in front of a jury even if the case facts have nothing to with Disney+.
Yup, that’s about the size of it. And almost nobody reads those provisions when they sign up for trial subscriptions, or would ever think that is what they are agreeing to. For the latter reason, I suspect that Disney’s ruthless argument will fail, but it might not, and because it might not, it is technically an “ethical” position to take. “A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law,” says Rule 3.1 of the lawyer ethics rules in Florida and everywhere else. All a desperate or contrived legal argument has to be is in “good faith,” meaning the lawyer making it, however dubiously or mistakenly, genuinely believes that it might prevail.
I still think this is a really bad position to take. An ethical lawyer should tell Disney, “Yeah, we can try this, and it might work, but your company will take a PR beating whether it works or not. Isn’t Disney supposed to be the good guys? I’ll file this if you insist, but frankly, as a father, I wouldn’t have anything further to do with a company that uses fine print like this.”
And an ethical company should either come up with a just defense or pay the $50,000. This case is already getting bad publicity from almost every U.S. news source from “People” to NPR, and from many abroad too.
Morons.
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Pointer: Curmie
Ethics Alarms 
Disney should be counting its lucky stars that with death involved the man isn’t suing for dozens of millions of dollars.
Pay the pittance and be done.
This is a classic case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. Regrettably, there is a segment of the population that doesn’t get the concept and goes ahead anyway.
Who among us believes smoking tobacco is good for you or at least harmless? Despite the knowledge people still smoke. Drinking and driving is also not a good idea, yet people continue to get arrested for DWI offenses and worse yet kill others because of their bad choices.
JFK’s infidelities didn’t seem to harm him politically. Not so for Gary Heart. Tiger Wood’s infidelities cost him millions. What causes people to ignore common sense, probability, or generally accepted rules of decorum, is difficult to quantify and probably varies from person to person. Jack’s listing of Unethical Rationalizations and Misconceptions, does an excellent job of describing people’s excuses for their behavior but what causes the behavior in the first place? Stupidity, arrogance, egoism, mind-altering drugs, and mental defects all come to mind as causes for this behavior. Except for mental defects people engaging in immoral or unethical acts know or should have known the actions were “wrong” but proceeded anyway.
Disney does not suffer from mental defects unless adherence to progressive ideals and wokeness are mental defects. As yet they are not listed in The International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) index. Whether Disney pays a significant price for their actions in the referenced case remains to be seen. It will depend upon how much attention and ridicule it receives in the media for their actions. Given Disney’s love of all things woke I guess the odds are 70% they receive no negative repercussions.
I saw this story, too. I thought it was a ridiculous position for Disney to take. This is why people get angry at corporations. It would not surprise me if shenanigans like this prompt advocacy groups to push for greater regulation of a company’s TOS and for such agreements to be strictly limited to the service in question as opposed to a broader business application. Where ethics fail, the law steps in, after all.
Well, since companies are allowed to revoke our access to the courts and force us to use arbitrators that they hire, these arbitators must be ‘fair’, right? The courts wouldn’t take away our access to the legal system to send us to a rigged system set up to protect companies from their wrongdoing, would they? So, the dismissal of arbitration as an option makes it obvious that arbitration is a joke and that the arbitrators find for the companies so they can keep the companies’ business.
So, why not go to arbitration? Up the demand to at least a few million and make a big stink about the fact that you have to go through arbitration. Make it clear to the arbitration company that the whole arbitration industry is on trial with this one. Everyone will be watching.
My bet is that if you did that, the arbitration company would decline and say the case needs to go to the courts. OK, a cynical strongarming of an entire industry to get what you want probably isn’t ethical. However, it might be the first step to reform. Since everyone dismissed the arbitration idea out of hand, it is obvious that no one feels that it is an honest system. How do we get it reformed or eliminated?