Meh, I'd call that negligence. They're knowingly allowing harm to come to others, through putting in a token effort (CYA style) rather than instituting meaningful change.
And it's their marketplace, so they get to set the rules, and they have significant resources if they actually wanted to engage.
>> This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money...
> Being a small business doesn't give you the right to be negligent.
I can't understand this attitude that it's negligence to not want to be bankrupted by poorly crafted regulations.
We're dealing with things like a website to sell wood carvings that someone makes as a hobby. They've got names and addresses because they need to know where to ship them.
This is not a reasonable place to apply a complex regulatory framework. The idea that this involves "serious responsibility" or "grave risks" is akin to applying a regulatory framework designed for an oil refinery to a garage sale because a used lawnmower may contain some "hazardous" motor oil.
It's not that the danger isn't theoretically possible, it's that the regulatory requirements are totally inappropriate to the context.
>this attitude is being deliberately nurtured by big businesses to erode support for class-action lawsuits
While this may be true that's not my issue with this. I know that class-action suits are not meant to make injured parties whole but that's exactly what I take issue with. The fact that a company can essentially pay away its mistakes, when most are knowingly made, is a direct result of the lawyers. I can't help but think of Fight Club - if the cost to change the offending process/product is more than the cost of potential lawsuits, the change isn't made. While that's good business, it's immoral and wrong.
> It just seems ludicrous that the board could run a company into the ground like this and just shrug "nah we're nonprofit so you can't touch us and BTW we don't even need to make any statements whatsoever".
As ludicrous as that might seem, that's pretty much the reality.
The only one that would have a cause of action in this is the non-profit itself, and for all intents and purposes, the board of said non-profit is the non-profit.
Assuming that what people claim is right and this severely damages the non-profit, then as far as the law is concerned, it’s just one of a million other failed non-profits.
The only caveat to that would be if there were any impropriety, for example, when decisions were made that weren’t following the charter and by-laws of the non-profit or if the non-profit’s coffers have been emptied.
Other than that, the law doesn’t care. In a similar way the law wouldn’t care if you light your dollar bills on fire.
> If there was a clear mens rhea to cause harm or awareness of that harm and a disregard for the consequences to others then why shouldn't we treat it similarly?
Yes, and we do. That’s well below the threshold of commercial disputes.
> If you own a business, you have the right to make "moral code" decisions about how your business operates.
They are making that decision. Their decision is to act as a service provider that does not pass judgement on any users of their platform operating within the law. There is nothing wrong with this decision - it is a non-decision.
I'm more perturbed by providers that choose to take a side. Those providers are now implicitly morally approving of all remaining users of their platform.
>> It's Limited Liability in it's purest, most distilled form.
I didn't say what should happen. The company is just publicly waffling about it's own behavior. I find that annoying is all even if it's kind of expected.
> None of this is illegal (except in this case obviously) but it still feels like something that should be illegal, amazes me we're so poor at going after what's obviously a predatory business practice.
Legality often has nothing to do with it. It's whether or not someone is willing to fight. In the US, it's a cumbersome process to fight something like this, so businesses routinely abuse the system.
It was a breech of trust. Is a breech of trust absolutely and objectively wrong in all circumstances? I'm not comfortable saying it is, at least not without far more thought.
(P.S. I wonder if their contract in any way forbid this from being done. Because if not, this is no worse 'buyer beware' behavior than what is common among corporate America already.)
Having seen quite a few instances of deliberate malice I beg to differ. It is out of deliberate malice, though there may be a couple of cases where it is an emergent thing. The vast majority of these companies are aware of it, won't change their ways and have a hundred different ways to rationalize their illegal behavior.
>The problem is people are stupid and uninformed about giving consent. You're the one trying to loophole around that.
Not really. People have a limited amount of time to deal with issues and aren't trained legally. This doesn't make them stupid. Their inability to suss out all possible downsides of a set of EULAs across various products for a service they're looking for isn't stupidity; it's just an inherently complex space that requires a lot of time and specialist knowledge.
This is one of the main ideas behind consumer law; certain contracts are inherently slanted towards those who draft the contract, therefore we remove some of their freedom to abuse consumers by placing limits on the clauses we're willing to enforce.
That lack of willingness to place restraints on these types of freedom has less to do with the inherent difficulty of restraining freedom of contract and has more to do with the fact that the harm is distributed diffusely amongst a massive swath of consumers, vs felt acutely by specific data aggregators so one side advocates far more for their position - even if that position is antisocial in nature.
Meh, I'd call that negligence. They're knowingly allowing harm to come to others, through putting in a token effort (CYA style) rather than instituting meaningful change.
And it's their marketplace, so they get to set the rules, and they have significant resources if they actually wanted to engage.
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