cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17618684
Forced arbitration means any legal disputes you may have with Discord must be resolved through a single third party mediator, who 99% of the time is chosen by, and will rule in favor of, the corporation/Discord. This effectively removes all your legal rights as a consumer, because arbitration decisions are legally binding and non-appealable.
The new ToS goes into effect April 15th, 2024.
YOU CAN OPT OUT OF ARBITRATION. You must email arbitration-opt-out@discord.com BEFORE MAY 15TH (30 days after ToS effective date) with your username stating that you wish to opt out of the arbitration clause. Once May 15th passes you are bound to arbitration with Discord forever.
Opt-out before it’s too late.
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
I can’t opt out if its a chat like the graphemeOS discord bridge that feeds my data to discord without consent.
Does that applies to accounts registered in the US but now I’m not physically lived in?
Innocence is no protection, truth is no defense.
It will if they can make it. Ditch this shit in every way you can.
Can I ask how this is going to affect other countries outside the US? I do not want to accept something that I do not really know how to handle because it doesn’t really apply to my country.
Just a reminder for me to check this thread later.
These are the main parts that mention locations for it, I’m no lawyer but it looks like this only applies to people in the US, with lighter restrictions for California residents, someone please correct me if I’m wrong
If you are a consumer residing in the European Union, this clause and these terms in general do not affect any mandatory consumer rights you may have under your local law, and all disputes arising in connection with the services and/or these terms shall be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court of Amsterdam, the Netherlands or, if you are a consumer, to a court closer to your domicile if in an EU Member State.
The Federal Arbitration Act, federal arbitration law, and California law will apply to these terms and any disputes related to these terms or our services, regardless of conflict of laws rules. Any dispute that is not subject to arbitration will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts in San Francisco County, California, and you and Discord both consent to venue and personal jurisdiction in these courts.
IF YOU’RE A U.S. RESIDENT, YOU ALSO AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING MANDATORY ARBITRATION PROVISIONS. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY – IT MAY SIGNIFICANTLY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT: (rest of the document)
Is anyone still using discord? 🫠
Many, many people. It can be very hard to avoid. You must live in a foss bubble to think that no one does.
Isn’t everyone living in a Foss bubble already? 🥲
I’m trying my hardest.
Wholesome exchange, folks. Keep up the good work.
It’s hard NOT to use it when every damn project uses it for announcements and discussions.
Be me.
Playing game. Custom mod.
New release! Much excite. Find bug.
Investigate bug. Find replication steps. Take several screenshots.
Go to report bug. No git. Only discord links.
Delete screenshots and go back to playing.
i genuinely think compiling the bugs with some details in a youtube video and posting it on youtube would be more useful than finding that discord and joining it lmao
I’m all for providing free support/testing for community projects…
But discord is not meant for documentation/management/bug tracking.
I just can’t even…
The only way to communicate to the dev is via discord. I don’t mind that. But I don’t want to join yet another server!
Create a Lemmy topic? Free and open source, better organized 🤔
What makes you think the Dev will notice a Lemmy post or will even know what Lemmy is, if they’re not even using git for reports and are using a chat client for something that it should have never been used for.
I’m also not going to complain about a free mod created by a dev for the community.
If they wanna have discord as their documentation/issue tracking I just won’t contribute.
What is forced arbitration and why is it bad?
ToS and the like are legal documents that people/customers ‘sign’ or agree to before using a service or product, usually agreed or signed AFTER a purchase has been made. Arbitration causes in these documents mean that you agree to not sue the company for any reason, like a class action lawsuit. Basically if you feel like you have been scammed or taken advantage of by that company, you cannot sue for damages. ToS are not the law though and can be superceded by legal means, like a lawsuit ironically. Correct me if I’m not 100% correct, as I’m not a lawyer and this is just my understanding of this.
If a company does something bad, you can sue to fix it.
Suing sets legal precedent and forces all companies to abide by the ruling, more or less.
But now if a company tricks you out of your right to sue by putting arbitration clauses in everything, then you can’t sue. You can only have a (hopefully) impartial third part tell the company to stop doing something specifically to you. The company is still free to keep doing the thing to everyone else, and their arbitration doesn’t affect any other companies also doing bad things.
There are other issues too.
Most importantly, Discord pays the arbitrator.
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/arbitration/what-is-arb.html
Essentially, arbitration waives your right to sue the company in any capacity and instead requires all legal disputes to be resolved by a 3rd party mediator hand picked by the company.
You can guess how often these arbitrators rule against the companies that pay them (Spoiler: it’s not often)
It’s used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for companies to basically have legal immunity from any kind of consequences, as all their customers must arbitrate and get told to suck eggs.You can also watch one of Louis Rossmann’s latest rants about ToS changes and arbitration being forced down users’ throats suddenly without warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AddtrV6UFFs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=AddtrV6UFFs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m sure that this won’t stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
this is pretty funny. dickcord lives so far up its own ass that it believes it is above the law. sorry but this wont fly. typical corporation lmao.
Thankfully no TOS is legally binding here since pressing agree doesn’t count as signing a document.
Do you have anything to prove that? I’m serious, This feels like it shouldn’t be binding but I can find no legal reasons or information that it wouldn’t be, and I would really like to find that.
Seems ludicrous that a company can be like “OK STARTING IN 30 DAYS NO SUING US ALLOWED. IF YOU DON’T SPECIFICALLY TELL US WITHIN THOSE 30 DAYS THAT YOU MIGHT SOMEDAY NEED TO SUE US THEN YOU NEVER CAN FOREVER.” But then a lot of stuff here is ludicrous.
It depends on where you live. In Germany, forced arbitration in general TOS is invalid and has to be separately negotiated and agreed to. In general, what you can put into your TOS is pretty restricted, anything you put in there that a consumer wouldn’t reasonably expect is not gonna be legally binding.
That is the case for all of Europe and most of the rest of the world. That’s why that ToS change is only for US customers.
My country only considers electronic signatures made by our national ID cryptographic signature system to be legally binding in contracts. A ToS without that and just an agree button can only be used to set rules within that platform here. In a court a ToS is basically meaningless.
Fun fact: Our online voting system works on the same principle.
Ah ok I misunderstood your comment.
I had just read the thing and had that it only applied to US fresh in my head. Then I read your comment and assumed “here” referred to US also. My bad.
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Too late mate is a shit long ago
Its always been shit
It seems largely fallen out of favour but I’m genuinely wondering how Teamspeak is still going and hasn’t succumbed to enshittification
lmao no way in hell this is legally binding
Welcome to America. New here?
is it 30 days BEFORE april 15th, or 30 days AFTER april 15th?
You have until May 15. The announcement just went out today; if they tried to make it retroactive, it wouldn’t hold up in court.
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
Um this is not going to hold up in the Ontario Consumer Protection Tribunal due to this: Ontario’s Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (“Consumer Protection Act”) prohibits mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers in consumer agreements.
The fact that they’re even trying thus needs to trigger an exodus.friends don’t let friends use discord.
Just give me a snippet to file a consumer protection application. It’ll get struct down
A what protection… That’s not a real thing, and if you rely on abusive daddy and his magic hammer to save you, you’re going to be so fucked.
Just stop using it. Get your friends to stop using it. Ditch this garbage. This isnt even the biggest reason to do that anyway.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that these types of forced arbitration violates my province’s Consumer Protection Act
There’s an even easier method, if you do not log in for a year or so, discord deletes your account
along with our data?
whoa whoa whoa let’s not get carried away
Think of those poor data brokers… I mean “poor” in the figurative sense…
Expecting Discord to delete your data is like expecting a company to burn the money you paid them after you stop doing business with them.
Seriously?
Yes
Inb4 people who opt out start finding themselves getting randomly banned for vague, obscure TOS reasons.
oh good lord i hope not.
I’ll update if it happens.
I’m NO LAWYER but it seems to apply to US residents only? EU has their own provisions written down where discord begrudgingly follows the laws there. But for non-eu non-us people this doesn’t seem to apply to us. “IF YOU’RE A U.S. RESIDENT, YOU ALSO AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING MANDATORY ARBITRATION PROVISIONS. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY – IT MAY SIGNIFICANTLY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT:”
For folks who will continue using discord, and that’s probably most folks, it would be a good time to change your account email to an alias if you haven’t already. They have clearly stated they are about to get sketch AF.
I’m not sure what most of this means or how it could affect me, but you’re saying that as an EU citizen, this is not something I should be overly concerned with?
It means that the forced arbitration provisions do not apply to you if you’re in the EU, so you can still sue them by other means and with people not paid by them.
That’s good to hear. Everyone else was only talking about the US and EU, and I’m like… “what about me, who doesn’t live in either?” 😐