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Yes. If you are making promises to users in your non-TOS site text, you might want to run that by a lawyer too. Patreon is getting its butt handed to them bec

Yes. If you are making promises to users in your non-TOS site text, you might want to run that by a lawyer too. Patreon is getting its butt handed to them because they didn't understand that. Getting your TOS checked after the legislature has met might not hurt either.

paulcole 6y ago
> Patreon is getting its butt handed to them In what way specifically? Also, assuming they are “getting their butt handed to them” it’s only because they are huge and successful. If they were a failure nobody would care. And if they had kept up with TOS updates and still ended up a failure would they be saying, “boy glad we dropped that $5k on a lawyer.” If you get big enough you can overcome any legal misstep you made in the early days whether it was accidental or malicious.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > In what way specifically? Patreon said disputes had to go through arbitration, and couldn't go through class action law suit. Patreon removed a creator. That person's patreons all went to arbitration. Patreon declined the arbitration, and went to court to convert all those individual arbitration cases into one big class action. The court said they couldn't do that, and the reason the court said that was because of the ToS drawn up by Patreon. So now Patreon has to go to arbitration on thousands of cases, and has to pay the fees. The fees bill is a couple of million dollars.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    Facebook paid the Winklevoss twins like $50 million. Had they gone to a lawyer on day 1 and asked what to do the advice would've likely been, "don't steal their idea." Get big enough and then use somebody else's money to pay off your multimillion dollar mistakes. Or go out of business and it won't matter anyway.
    - strgcmc 6y ago
      The trick is getting big enough and keeping the mistakes small enough. What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? A risk that has a 1% chance of wiping out 100% of your company, vs a risk that a 10% of chance of costing you 10% of your company, are not the same even though the net "expected value" is nominally 1% for both.
      - paulcole 6y ago
        > What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? If if's and but's were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry christmas. If $50 million could bankrupt FB then the Winklevoss twins would have never got that much.
  - blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
    Drowning companies with mandatory binding arbitration claims is a relatively new tactic - when the ToS was written arbitration was favored because it had better outcomes for the companies writing the ToS. It's unlikely Patreon's lawyers could have predicted this very common contract provision would backfire.

paulcole 6y ago

> Patreon is getting its butt handed to them In what way specifically? Also, assuming they are “getting their butt handed to them” it’s only because they are huge and successful. If they were a failure nobody would care. And if they had kept up with TOS updates and still ended up a failure would they be saying, “boy glad we dropped that $5k on a lawyer.” If you get big enough you can overcome any legal misstep you made in the early days whether it was accidental or malicious.

DanBC 6y ago
> In what way specifically? Patreon said disputes had to go through arbitration, and couldn't go through class action law suit. Patreon removed a creator. That person's patreons all went to arbitration. Patreon declined the arbitration, and went to court to convert all those individual arbitration cases into one big class action. The court said they couldn't do that, and the reason the court said that was because of the ToS drawn up by Patreon. So now Patreon has to go to arbitration on thousands of cases, and has to pay the fees. The fees bill is a couple of million dollars.
- paulcole 6y ago
  Facebook paid the Winklevoss twins like $50 million. Had they gone to a lawyer on day 1 and asked what to do the advice would've likely been, "don't steal their idea." Get big enough and then use somebody else's money to pay off your multimillion dollar mistakes. Or go out of business and it won't matter anyway.
  - strgcmc 6y ago
    The trick is getting big enough and keeping the mistakes small enough. What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? A risk that has a 1% chance of wiping out 100% of your company, vs a risk that a 10% of chance of costing you 10% of your company, are not the same even though the net "expected value" is nominally 1% for both.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      > What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? If if's and but's were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry christmas. If $50 million could bankrupt FB then the Winklevoss twins would have never got that much.
- blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
  Drowning companies with mandatory binding arbitration claims is a relatively new tactic - when the ToS was written arbitration was favored because it had better outcomes for the companies writing the ToS. It's unlikely Patreon's lawyers could have predicted this very common contract provision would backfire.