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Now I’ll never sign up for Disney+

You know those interminable, petty, long-winded End-User License Agreement that you’re expected to sign when you get some new tech thingie? I’m afraid I’ll never bother to read all that lawyerese, even though apparently it can affect your life in surprising ways.

Disney is trying to get a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a New York University doctor’s grieving husband tossed — because he signed up for the Disney+ streaming service years earlier, court papers said.

Kanokporn Tangsuan’s bereaved husband Jeffrey Piccolo is currently suing the theme park juggernaut claiming that she suffered a fatal allergic reaction shortly after eating at a Disney Springs restaurant in Florida last October.

But Disney is now claiming the $50,000 suit should be moved out of the courts because Piccolo agreed to arbitrate all disputes with the company when he first signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service back in 2019, court documents charge.

Wanting to see Star Wars or Marvel movies should now be considered a deleterious disease, like gambling or alcoholism. Who knows what else is buried in that EULA? Disney will own your first-born, has droit du seigneur, can garnish your wages, owns all the minerals stored in your corpse. You won’t find out until a lawyer knocks at your door.

Some scenery » « It begins again

Comments

  1. outis says

    And don’t forget Ius primae noctis.
    Where do you think all those little mice come from? (and maybe Huey, Dewey & Louie).

  2. says

    Hmmmm. New York Post, Newsday, one local TV station, India Today and the Law&Order advertising/blog site are the only places mentioning this story that I could find. Given those are all unreliable sources I’m interested to see some info from a few trustworthy news sites.

  3. Hemidactylus says

    PZ reads the NY Post?

    This reminds me of a South Park episode:
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad

    Meanwhile, Cartman’s classmate and frequent nemesis Kyle Broflovski, who did not read the Terms and Conditions when agreeing to download the latest iTunes update, is pursued by shadowy agents from Apple Inc., who wish to perform several intrusive acts upon him, informing him that he agreed to them when he downloaded the update. Kyle attempts to flee the men and is incredulous when his friends tell him they all read the entire Terms and Conditions when they downloaded the latest update. Kyle seeks refuge at his father Gerald’s law office. Still, the Apple agents taser Gerald, kidnap Kyle, and throw him in a cage with a Japanese man named Junichi Takiyama and a young woman who also failed to read the fine print of their purchased updates.

    At a Stevenote address, Steve Jobs unveils the new product for which Kyle and the other two were kidnapped: the HUMANCENTiPAD, comprising the three kidnapped subjects on all fours and sewn together mouth to anus. Junichi Takiyama is in front, with an iPhone attached to his forehead; Kyle is in the middle; and the woman is at the rear, with an iPad attached to her anus. However, Jobs is disappointed when Kyle continues to sign agreements that are put in front of him without reading them first, and puts the “device” through tests in an attempt to make it read.

  5. Walter Solomon says

    I agree with, paulhutch. Those sources are questionable. Still, I’ll take any opportunity to shit on Disney that’s provided before returning to shitting on anything Elon Musk owns.

  9. Hemidactylus says

    Recursive Rabbit @8
    The first season of The Punisher was pretty good. Secrets of the Octopus too though you can see that on Hulu. I wonder if Disney language has crept into Hulu or ESPN+ terms.

  10. Hemidactylus says

    Also Disney garnered some sympathy over their clash with Desantis, though before that there’s been plenty to side-eye Disney about. Now Disney is again turning heel?

  11. robro says

    Not a lawyer, but that seems like a misapplication of the terms of a EULA. When she was eating at that restaurant neither of them were “end users” of the Disney+ streaming service. Strikes me as some corporate lawyer trying to win points by harassing the plaintiff. And over $50k? How much is Disney worth these days?

    And don’t worry about the Hulu vs Disney vs any other EULA. They’re all full crap that some lawyer could try to use. I’m convinced they are written to discourage customers from reading them in the first place. I vaguely remember reading about some case years ago granting that customers can’t be expect to read those things.

  12. Hemidactylus says

    robro @11
    Here’s Hulu (enjoy):
    https://www.hulu.com/subscriber_agreement#section7

    Before that section under 1 b. Registration and Access:

    Once available, by registering for the Services without a pre-existing MyDisney account, you are creating a MyDisney account. Your email address and password for the Services will be managed by MyDisney. Your MyDisney account is governed by the Disney Terms of Use which can be found at disneytermsofuse.com.

    I can’t say what any of that means and I’m not going to worry too much about it.

  14. awomanofnoimportance says

    Robro, No. 11, the suit seeks a minimum of 50k, not 50k.

    Florida courts have different departments that handle disputes in different dollar amounts. Small claims is up to 8k, county court is 8k to 50k and circuit court, where the suit was filed, is for disputes over 50k. So, for jurisdictional reasons, the complaint has to say that it is seeking at least 50k in damages to show it was filed in the right court. In reality, the plaintiff is probably looking for something in the neighborhood of seven figures, and Disney would be only to happy to get out of it for 50k.

  15. andywuk says

    Reality meets art.

    I remember reading an SF novel where a major plot point was the fall of an industrial house due to one of it’s members using a discount coupon where, buried in the T&C’s, was a clause signing over the house/company to their competitor. Unfortunately for the life of me I can’t remember the book or who wrote it (they were obviously taking the piss), but it was from around the time when much was being made of T&C’s that regularly exceeded the works of Shakespeare in length.

    I’m not sure whether such T&C’s are legally enforceable in reality – it would depend a lot on where you live. For giggles I tried looking for how long T&C’s can get and came across this handy Australian Site (https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/business-insurance/features/longest-terms-and-conditions/). Most of the companies are international (I’m in the UK myself) – and there’s absolutely no sane way the average person could be expected to wade through and understand T&C’s running to 10’s of thousands of words of legalese when ordering a burger.

    My feeling is that Disney and their lawyers deserve a short, sharp and very expensive reality check.

  16. richardh says

    No problem in the UK: liabilty for death and injury cannot be excluded by contract. The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 states, right at the start of Part I:
    “2.-(1) Negligence liability.

    A person cannot by reference to any contract term or to a notice given to persons generally or to particular persons exclude or restrict his liability for death or personal injury resulting from negligence.”

  17. tacitus says

    Attorneys for Disney claim that the Disney+ terms state: “When you create a Disney+ or ESPN+ account, you also agree to the Walt Disney Company’s Terms of Use,” which “govern your use of other Disney Services”. The services include “sites, software, applications, content, product and services”, which include the Disney Parks and Resorts website, they say.

    So you could even be signing up for an ESPN+ account on the ESPN website and you would be forever denied the possibility of suing Disney, even if you didn’t know that ESPN had anything to do with them.

    And what’s to stop mega-corporations from adding such terms and conditions to every product they sell, including kid’s toys and tickets for theme parks? Will Disney lawyers demand a full inventory of a plaintiff’s collection of toys, books, and videos, along with scouring their credit card records for any purchases they might have made 20 years ago?

  18. warriorpoet says

    “ The services include “sites, software, applications, content, product and services”, which include the Disney Parks and Resorts website, they say.”

    I am not a lawyer, but I do know that the idea of “a reasonable person’s understanding” is a standard that the courts generally follow,
    because these contracts are supposedly required to be written to be understood by the average human. That being the case, this one shouldn’t be tossed, as nothing in the ToS mentions the parks. “Sites”, for example, would likely be interpreted by a reasonable person to mean websites, after all this was a EULA for an online service. The lawyers are claiming it includes the parks, but that isn’t specified in the relevant section.

    If the victim died of an allergic reaction at a restaurant, a much more effective and sympathetic argument would be that they never gave the restaurant sufficient information about her dietary restrictions. Just playing Devil’s advocate here, but that feels like a tough hurdle for a plaintiff in a suit like this to clear.

  19. Kagehi says

    A fair number of these stupid sort of EULAs have been shot down over the years, precisely for this sort of nonsense, but corporate lawyers keep pulling them out of their backsides anyway, because they are a) nearly boilerplate now, b) the lawyers all seem to think they are Trump, and can get by with anything (up until they can’t), with no accountability, and c) they are usually right, in as much as most instances in which someone goes along with their bullshit is too small an amount to sue them over it. That, and even if the government wanted to crack down on this nonsense, they Republicans have probably both encouraged it, and defunded what ever group is supposed to do so. It does remind me of the recent idiocy with a brand of refrigerators with the same sort of nonsense printed on the box they where shipped in. Problem there wasn’t so much, “No one reads that nonsense, they just click accept.”, but literally that, unless you manhandle the things home yourself, literally no one who has one installed ever freaking looks at the original shipping box, or sees the bloody arbitration statement. It still likely wouldn’t help them if, instead of just failing over and over due to a design flaw that kept causing the compressor to fail, a bunch of them had started lighting on fire and burning down people’s houses, or somehow shorted out and electrocuting people.

    Basically, almost ever company, whether you know it or not, likely has this stupid crap in their license some place, which no one bothered to read. Most of the cases where it comes up just are not worth a lawsuit, since the suit would cost more than was lost. And cracking down on this sort of BS is only going to happen with new legislation (and someone actually funding the people who have to then enforce it). So, yeah.. some idiot in everyone one of these companies, whether the views of the company itself are as insane or not, is bound to try to pull this kind of idiocy, just because they where “allowed” to slap such nonsense in the license in the first place. Frustrating, but I doubt it will work, since it a) is big enough to counter sue over, and b) I seriously doubt the freaking parks also have a EULA tied to tickets, which demand the same BS.

  20. says

    Related: About the Kingdom of the Rodent – I knew artists, refugees from disney, who said disney was a sweatshop for artists. And, I have an article archived about disney setting a precedent by not paying their writers. Happiest Place on Earth???

    Also, PZ’s site was down for ~1.5hrs from about 0830hrs Scarizona time. Is that blue host??

  21. Owlmirror says

    I think Popehat started this:

    https://bsky.app/hashtag/OtherHiddenDisneyTerms

    If you ever watched The Mandalorian, Disney is legally entitled to shoot one or both of your parents for dramatic or narrative purposes

    ========
    If a Disney employee is injured on the job, Disney is entitled to have them put down and take a tax write-off.

    ========
    When you wish upon a star, that wish becomes the intellectual property of the Disney corporation unless you object in writing within 7 business days.

    ========
    Any claim of sexual harassment of a Disney employee or contractor must be adjudicated by loser-pays arbitration before Gaston

    ========
    You can be expelled from Disney World for refusing to take off your pants when Donald Duck requests it

    ========
    If you fall asleep or lose a shoe while inside a Disney property, you must marry the first male executive who finds you

    ========
    Disney employee HMO plan restricts OBGYN visits to in-plan consultant Captain Hook

    ========
    If you spoke ill of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Bob Iger is allowed to put Micky Mouse under a bucket on your chest and heat the bucket with a blow torch.

    … And so on and so forth