@kpaadet said:

I knew is was written by Patrick the second I read the headline, taking something and blowing it way out of proportion seems to be his M.O., you dont have to be a laywer to know this wont hold up in court. Terms of Services are not legal binding. I am really not liking what Patrick Klepek is turning Giantbomb into.

The headline sounds entirely accurate to me. What part of it do you think is out of proportion?

Sony -is- asking you to waive the rights you agreed to, and you -do- have options.

This is increasingly becoming the standard with a lot of companies. Check out the terms on your Best Buy card, or many other Line of Credit cards.

They may want to avoid Class Action, but one thing that you can do, and puts a big hurt on their legal team, is group arbitration. If everyone that would've signed up for a Class Action suit instead goes with arbitration, Sony has to have a representative present or lose the arbitration "case". This has been done with other mandatory arbitration cases, and has brought about a swift change in TOS verbiage.

Fanboyism over basic rights abound. Of course nobody expects to sue Sony, and aside from the law firm representing the case those in a class action lawsuit don't get rich. If you were to get more than 5$ being a non founding member of a class action lawsuit against Sony then they would have had to put out a console that caused seizures in 75% of its owners. The purpose of a class action lawsuit is not for high monetary gain for the plaintiffs but for high monetary loss for the defendant due to some gross negligence on their part. It's meant to keep them in line so they cannot take advantage of the consumer. I 100% agree that the majority of these lawsuits are frivolous BS brought up by selfish and self righteous people that should never see the light of day. But if they were to do something serious, such as use a part that has a known risk to catch fire within a system but risk it to keep costs down, you should not give up your right to make sure your heard.

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! It's not that big of a deal! Most class action lawsuits are just cash grabs, and if you're THAT worried about them pulling something under the guise of "diplomatic immunity," keep this in mind. Even if it came to that, if they pissed off people bad enough, this would lose them potential customers, so they'd shoot themselves in the foot. They're just trying to protect themselves from greedy lawsuits/lawyers/gamers. Remember the guy that tried to sue them over refusal of service for maintenance on his PS3... then later we find out that this was because he was practically too lazy to clean the LAYER of dirt he left on the damn thing? Yeah, that.

I love this site for it's fanboys... Question a console maker and everyone who loves it hates you. God I hate fanboys, and for the record I own all the systems and still prefer PC gaming. Before you go flaming me, please think before you type.

Also good story Patrick, very informative and I'll be sending my letter just because I can :) Keep up the awesome work!

Collectively sue for what? Want be be angry about something be angry about cutting down old growth forest on public lands, fracking natural gas out of the ground, or 500 million tons of non-degrading plastic floating in our oceans.

What is happeing to the news around here? Why are we suddely getting news with a distinct agenda that seesm to just be Patricks whim? Is Mr. Kelpek supped to be the Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart of GB, because he should know he'll needs a gagel of New York writers behind him to be that interesting?

And now PSN is down until... With no news of when it will be up. This article was pretty timely, Patrick

Yeah MonkeyKing1969, Live has been mysteriously down a shitload of times, and Live accounts are getting hijacked back and forth en masse lately and nothing about that, even Live accounts belonging to people who don't even have a 360, just own a phone and boom, ripped off, relocated to China or Russia, CC data belonging to the account gets used to buy a bunch of Live points and burn them.. and nothing.

@Robiin said:

And now PSN is down until... With no news of when it will be up. This article was pretty timely, Patrick

this is true, and ironic.

big deal. you lose the right to get 43 cents from some half-assed class action suit if sony looses your email address. big. freakin. deal. they'll give you a free game and a free resistance shirt under the table if you cry hard enough, which you'll like better anyway.

@phantomzxro said:

@go_diego_go said:

@phantomzxro: @phantomzxro said:

@wickedsc3 said:

@lordgodalming said:

once again you are giving me a story in which you can't prove i'm not saying no one was affect i'm just saying many people are using this as a reason to give sony all this heat when they were not affect or even know anyone who was affect. For the most part Sony has done its job to make good on this and If your ID or card info was taken i don't think you will have a problem with sony helping you on this matter. So you are creating a story that can't be proven yourself. I don't think you will have a problem sueing sony for all the money their worth if an extreme case like that was to happen, and rightfully so. But don't you find it strange that sony has gotten sued more for removing linux then people info being hack from sony. The reason is many people are going overbroad with trying to sue sony for anything. But i'm not here to try and defend sony i think they learned from their mistakes and made good on it. If you feel different that is fine by me, because sure a company looks out for themself but there is a check and balance also because they need customers to make money so they have to take care of their customers if they want money, so most companies are not trying to screw over their customers or at the very least not out in the open. like i said this is only in place to weed out bogus class action lawsuits, if you really have a case i'm sure a judge would be happy to throw this out if they deem it worthy.

Christ the stupidity spewing from your mouth is pathetic......... I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or just really are that stupid.......

@Cyrisaurus: It's really sad that i as an non-american have to do this but i have to do this so maybe you can see the pure wrongness of your statement:

"Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security."

The sad part is that you are giving away your rights for a little bit of convenience. I can't decide if that's just sad or plain pathetic, but i'm pretty sure the founding fathers of your countrie are rotating in their graves right now.

Also you might now wanna sue sony now, but you never know what's gonna happen. You certainly won't miss your customer rights when a faulty PS3 unit sets your house on fire killing your family and destroying your whole life. Stuff like that NEVER happens right? You know like car's don't get sold without working breaks... oh wait..

@Nethlem: Yeah but you know what? That will never happen, and you know it.

You think you can throw some worst case scenario at me that has a 0.01% chance of happening and suddenly I'm wrong?

Not to mention, "shit happens". I'm not one of those fools who think that everything is someone else's fault and that I should be paid millions of dollars because "hot coffee burns when I spill it on myself".

Also, I'm sure there are a million other things wrong with this country that are making the founding fathers turn in their graves fast enough for them to drill into the Earth's core, I don't think some guy agreeing to a ToS for convenience in exchange for a right that he will never use is making it any worse.

I'm sure you're right though, we should all live over-protected lives with lawyers on our side ready to sue any company with money. You act like Ben Stiller's character from that movie where he is a Risk Analysis who never has fun.

Truly Mr. Klepek you are the Cronkite of our industry.

@Cyrisaurus: you should be careful making such blanket statements. especially ones you know nothing about. i had my credit card information stolen and used because of the psn breach. people do and should care. you never know when you will need those rights you are giving away. remember what happened to the man who gave up his freedom for security... he got neither.

Ehhh.. It;s not different from when you signed papers with a new employer. And people who use iTunes should read the EULA..

This is nothing new, b/c it's Sony it's slimey... click and just move one.

I would send in a letter.....but id rather just play some Battlefield then pretend to care that I cant sue a company I never had intention of suing in the first place

It's lame, but really, I would never have any intentions of suing them.

@Blackout62 said:

Truly Mr. Klepek you are the Cronkite of our industry.

I met Walter Chronkie in 1980's at the Tisbury Agricultural Society Fair; he was talking to my father as they both filled-in raffle tickets for the Jeep Wrangler. FUN FACT: Neither Walter nor my father won the jeep that year.

I don't want to sue Sony for any reason, but if you don't send a letter, you don't get online play. Which really is stupid.

Frankly anyone who finds this an acceptable practice is being a bit niave. If you are ok with giving over your rights to corporations why don't you just give them your power of attorney while you are at it. Just so long as you can play Gears 3, Diablo, or COD.

and here's the document I created to use as your personal template:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b6XnHCrCR8EnqagWFRDjfk7r3PUZ-mMVSlg6_l198WA/edit?hl=en_US

man sony really ? maybe you should not give people reason to sue you, if you dont wanna sue you but making us agree to some garbage that is unconstitutional , guess what , ill gladly renew my 360 , now thank you , after you been shut down yet again , lol it never seams to fail , when you get free service it really dont pay off , well in some cases, at least the wii was yet to surcome to this outage its not like sony offers me rugrats to begin with, ill keep my gold just for that reason , and that reason alone since online gaming just is not fun any more , especlly when you got hackers and such exploiting the game so it is impossible to win a single match speaking of that i just played a game of gta iv and to no suprise a guy admits to modding and guess what else i got it on facebook on video , lol , and i have already reported him lol sucks to be him i guess cause he sure signed out fast haha

@wickedsc3: 

Holy shit, I forgot about that whole fiasco. My bad :P

Sent my letter just to let them know I'm not going to stand by and let them waive my right to pursue legal action. I encourage everyone with a PSN account to do the same -- they've messed up once, they could do it again.

Thanks for the story, Patrick! You do great work :D

Wooooooooo, I'm American so I'm going to sue the shit out of Sony, thanks Klepek!

Yeah but really I don't know what Sony is thinking, don't they realize this is exactly the kind of stuff that produces rage around the internet. I don't think Sony is in the position to be endangering their public relations right now, at least not here in the U.S.

Also, pretty brilliant idea of having comments be like 1.5 line spaced, makes it easier to read--now to make the font blue...

Glad I left my PS3 in a dumpster in the middle of a thunderstorm.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/09/mandatory-ps3-update-removes-right-to-join-in-a-class-action-lawsuit.ars

Two things from the Ars article: don't forget to add your PSN account number, and absolutely get all of the US Mail bells and whistles (delivery confirmation, signatures, etc).

We all have rights. Signing them away thoughtlessly is yours if you wish. I'll send a letter.

Thanks for spreading good information, Patrick.