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Disney forbade the widowed man in their park to sue
Jeffrey Piccolo lost his wife, a doctor from the Langona New York Medical Center, Kanocorn Tansuan during a visit to Disney Entertainment Park. Tansuan died due to the negligence of the personnel of the local pub-she was an allergicist and during the order several times asked the waiter to make sure that the dishes did not contain the ingredients deadly for her. The employees assured that all the wishes of the clients were fulfilled, but after 45 minutes Tansuan had an attack, and she died. Piccolo tried to sue the owners of the pub and Disney, because it was on their map that this institution took into account the allergies of its customers. But it did not work out to file a lawsuit - when buying tickets, Piccolo used his account from the test version of the Disney service, a user agreement with which any proceedings with the company in court forbade him. "Cold" tells how Piccolo nevertheless achieved justice, despite the stubbornness of the corporation.
The company was covered by a user agreement, but everything changed the attention of the media
On October 5, Tansuan and Piccolo walked around Disney Park and went to dinner with the Irish pub, which is located in Disney Springs, an open-air and entertainment complex in the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena-Vista, Florida. It is no coincidence that the couple chose the restaurant: Tansuan suffered from severe allergies to nuts and dairy products, and on the Disney online card it was indicated that the restaurant could remove the ingredients from the dishes on demand. The couple warned the allergies of Tansuan restaurant employees several times.
They ordered fried scallops, onion rings, pancakes from broccoli and corn, as well as a vegan shepherd pie. Some of the dishes were not marked as hypoallergenic, but the waiter had to warn the cooks that part of these dishes needed to be removed part of the ingredients. After they brought food, the husband and wife noticed that there were no flags on the dishes about the absence of allergens that would indicate that the cook had fulfilled the request of visitors. Therefore, they clarified this again - and the waiter assured them that the request was fulfilled.
However, about 45 minutes after that, when Piccolo and Tansuan left the restaurant and were at the Planet Hollywood institution, she fell and began to choke. Despite the fact that she immediately injected Epinephrine (Epinephrine is an adrenaline , the main reanimating drug in the case of anaphylactic shock), Tansuan died in the hospital. The forensic expert concluded that death was caused by anaphylactic shock (life -threatening allergic reaction), which was provoked by an increased level of dairy products and nuts in the body.
Having buried his wife, Piccolo decided to get compensation from Tansuan’s guilty in death and sued the owner of the Irish pubs, Great Irish Pubs, as well as the Disney head company, which owns the park. The amount of compensation for non -pecuniary damage, as well as the expenses for emergency assistance and the funeral of his wife, Piccolo estimated at 50 thousand dollars.
But Disney lawyers reminded Piccolo about the user agreement that he signed when he issued a free subscription to the Disney Plus streaming service. In 2019, he started an account there for the seven days of free subscription, he used the same account in order to buy tickets to the Walt Disney World Park. The lawyers of the American company insisted that since he signed the terms of the user agreement, it means that he agreed on the condition that such conflicts are resolved in the order of individual arbitration.
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Before creating an account for watching films on the Disney Plus streaming service, you need to click on the phrase “I agree and continue” after the phrase “User Agreement” - Piccolo agreed and continued, without reading the agreement, on November 29, 2019 with his PlayStation console. If you open a user agreement, then in capital letters there will be written on the first page.
“Any dispute between you and us, with the exception of minor claims, is subject to rejection of a group claim and should be allowed in individual mandatory arbitration.”
Moreover, Piccolo signed the same agreement twice: the second time - a month before his wife’s death, when he bought a ticket to the Epcot thematic park through the My Disney Experience application. Therefore, “it doesn’t matter whether Piccolo actually acquainted with the terms of the agreement,” said Disney lawyers.
Piccolo’s lawyers insisted that the plaintiff could not know that, signing the user agreement with Disney, he refuses to sue the company and could not use it even at the moment when his wife dies on the land associated with the company. Moreover, the lawyers also clarified that Piccolo unsubscribed from the streaming service even before the money was written off from him.
“The idea that the conditions with which the consumer agrees when creating a free trial account Disney Plus will forever deprive him of the jury in any dispute with any branch or subsidiary of Disney is so outrageously unreasonably and unjustly, which should awaken the conscience of the judges,” the lawyers wrote .
Later, representatives of Disney replied : “We are deeply saddened by this loss and understand the grief of the family. Considering the fact that the restaurant is not managed by Disney and does not belong to it, we are simply trying to protect ourselves from the fact that the plaintiff’s lawyers are trying to include us in the lawsuit against the restaurant. ”
What was Disney afraid of?
Arbitration (from French Arbitrage) is, in fact, the arbitration court: as conceived, the conflict between the parties should be resolved with the help of a third party, an intermediary - an arbitrator or their college. This is necessary in order to resolve the conflict outside the court.
Arbitration in the USA
Mandatory arbitration is the norm in the world of corporate America. At the moment, according to the Left Analytical Center, Economic Policy Institute, about 60 million employees of American companies cannot go to court if they have a conflict with a hired company. This is due to the fact that the Americans refuse to join the trade unions, and the companies use it, forcing employees to sign coercive arbitration agreements.
A similar type of extrajudicial proceedings appeared in the United States in 1925 with the adoption of the Federal Law on Arbitration. According to Jonathan Lipson, a professor of law at the University of Temple, when adopting this law, the consumer was not taken into account at all - this law was created so that marine companies could avoid legal difficulties and agreements could be achieved only by handshake. He also believes that the way the law is used now is not at all how the Congress imagined it a century ago.
Experts are rightfully sure that large companies and corporations, such as Disney, find extra -court proceedings with customers attractive and convenient primarily for themselves. In this case, the conflict falls out of the public field and does not attract attention. However, the professor of law from the University of Pennsylvania David Hoffman believes that in the case of Disney, an attempt to do this brought the opposite effect:
“They were disgraced and received a bad glory for something that is not worth it,” he said.
According to Hoffman, the lawsuit against Disney is legitimate. A formal occasion in order to include them in the lawsuit, it may be that Tansuan and Piccolo have chosen a restaurant using the company's online cards that stated that the restaurant accepts visitors suffering from allergies.
The former judge of the Supreme Court of Florida Raul G. Kantero III, who is now working as a private lawyer, defends Disney in this case. Together with it, the company adhered to the protection line related to the user agreement. However, after the information got into the media, Disney had to completely abandon my words and allow Piccolo to sue them. In his new statement, the company representative said that they “value humanity above everything else”, as well as the case of the death of his wife Piccolo is “unique and requires a delicate approach”.
Hoffman is sure that Disney attracted Kantero in the hope of his connection in the authorities, which would allow the company to reduce the case to arbitration and minimal reputation costs.
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The compensation that Piccolo asks is a little money for Disney: as of September 2024, the corporation was a member of the TOP-100 of the most expensive companies in the world, and its net profit in 2023 amounted to $ 3.4 billion. The outcome of the case is not yet clear - there was no consideration on the merits.
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The case of Jeffrey Piccolo against Disney once again reminds that people and even companies forget or are frivolous about the conditions that they agree to. For example, in 2006, Vincent and Lisa Concepsion from the United States tried to sue the AT&T telecommunication company for misleading them regarding the cost of the phone. The victims wanted to file an AT&T on the court, but representatives of the company said that it was impossible to file a lawsuit against them because of the user agreement: it states that disputes with the company should be decided only as part of an individual arbitration-the consoles signed it when they bought a cell tariff from the company, to which a free phone was in addition. In 2011, the US Supreme Court then sided with the company.
The problem of the user agreement concerns not only private individuals. A similar dispute in 2020 occurred between Apple and the developer of computer games Epic Games, who sued the App Store policy. The company Epic Games wanted to receive money bypassing the store for applications, namely, inside its Fortnite game, which is why Apple deleted the game from the Epic Games from the store, and thenfiled a circuit against violation of the development agreement.
At the same time, Epic Games itself also prohibits users to sue the company directly individually or collectively - conflicts with them should be resolved only in the order of individual arbitration. Similar conditions for users in their agreement are put forward by the American Uber and the Russian Yandex.Taxi service, which actively disputes the claims against himself, referring to the user agreement. The Russian aggregator prescribes in this document that he is not responsible for the actions of drivers, as he is an intermediary between them and passengers.
For example, in November 2018, the driver beat the passenger Olga Sadvokasova. Because of this, Rospotrebnadzor ordered Yandex.Taxi to pay 100 thousand rubles of a fine-but the company challenged this decision. The arbitration court sided with the aggregator, considering that Rospotrebnadzor could not prove that Yandex.Taxi had mislead the client.
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Other Russian companies are also trying to use such methods, for example, large mobile operators - MTS, Beeline and Megafon - prescribe in their user agreement that they can increase the prices of tariffs unilaterally - this often brings them to dissatisfaction with subscribers, although it is considered legitimate. However, some increase in tariffs still attract the attention of the authorities represented by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which initiates the business operators against an “unreasonable increase in the cost of services”.
But it also happens that things end in favor of customers. Elena Grashchenkova had an accident due to the fault of a taxi driver in 2016. She sued Yandex.Taxi for about five years: in 2019, representatives of the aggregator still referred to the user agreement and insisted that they "were not responsible for such accidents and only provide software for the interaction of taxi and customers." In 2021, the court sided with Grashchenkova, and also fined the company 800 thousand rubles. Grashchenkova received payments for 2016–2021, and now she is seeking payments for the last three years.
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Author: editors "cold"