Did your Roku TV decide to strong arm you into giving up your rights or lose your FULLY FUNCTIONING WORKING TV? Because mine did.
It doesn’t matter if you only use it as a dumb panel for an Apple TV, Fire stick, or just to play your gaming console. You either agree or get bent.
Every company has started doing that. Almost every EULA now has clauses forcing you to give up your right to class action lawsuits and jury trials and to use corporate-friendly mediation instead.
Hasn’t that been a thing pretty much as long as EULAs?
No, it’s been pretty common in the last decade or so. First they added mediation clauses mostly just to scare people into using mediation instead of suing. But once they realized that courts were enforcing the clauses even though most legal experts assumed that they weren’t valid since most people couldn’t reasonably expected to read EULAs much less understand them and they were being added to things that people didn’t reasonably expect to have complex legal implications, they realized they could put other stuff in there and have it enforced. So now there’s tons of shady stuff in some of them.
Same thing as those companies that would send you a check for like a dollar that looked like it came from a legit source, but really was a marketing campaign paying that legit source for their customer lists and to put their name on it, and in the signature line on the back they’d add a bunch of text saying you agreed to sign up for some expensive service or whatever. People would cash the check without realizing what it was and then the company would sign them up for something and it was allowed for a long time even though many legal experts said it shouldn’t be legally binding.