Sony bans lawsuits

Well, some kinds of lawsuits, anyway.

Sony has inserted a new clause into its terms and conditions of service for the Playstation Network that states that users agree to waive their right to engage in a class action suit against the company. Class action suits are special kinds of legal action, where hundreds or thousands of individual claimants team up to prosecute a single claim against a defendant.

The move seems to come in direct response to the PSN hack, which compromised data on up to 100 million user accounts, and caused the company to shut down online services across most of the globe. Sony’s preparedness for attack and efforts to secure personal information correctly have come in for severe criticism, with several class actions being spawned in the US and Canada.

According to Gamasutra, the offending section of the terms of service read:

“Any Dispute Resolution Proceedings, whether in arbitration or court, will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class or representative action or as a named or unnamed member in a class, consolidated, representative or private attorney general action… unless both you and the Sony entity with which you have a dispute specifically agree to do so in writing following initiation of the arbitration.”

The new terms do not however apply to lawsuits filed before August 20th. Sony cannot retroactively apply restrictions that customers did not sign up to before launching their suit.

Users who do not wish to be bound by the new clause, but still wish to install the mandatory update to continue playing their games online, have thirty days to send a letter to Sony’s offices in California indicating that they opt out of the agreement. Reddit user schenkerian has helpfully created a simple form letter to ease the process.

Class action lawsuits are a feature of US law for which no real analogue exists in the UK. In fact, the whole section seems aimed squarely at curtailing the rights of US customers, who have caused Sony far more problems than their European equivalents. Whatever the outcome, the statutory rights of consumers this side of the Atlantic remain in as good (or indeed poor) condition as last week.