Disney+’s “I Agree” May Stop You From Suing if you Die at DisneyWorld

One downside of these mega mergers is that things that have nothing to do with each other are now totally related to each other.

Two recent cases.

Jeffrey Piccolo filed a lawsuit after his wife, Karen, died at a Disney owned restaurant in Florida. She had a fatal reaction to the food after being assured (incorrectly) there were no peanuts in it. Disney’s lawyers moved to have the lawsuit dismissed because he had signed up for a Disney+ trial years before. They claimed that Disney is Disney and a check of a box on trial account for a Disney TV channel means that he can’t sue any other Disney entity anywhere for anything ever until the sun cools down. Disney got their ass handed to them in the court of public opinion and backed down in this one particular case. Credit: The Wrap

In another case, John and Georgia McGinty were seriously injured in an Uber ride crash when their driver ran a red light and the car was T-boned. Uber said that they agreed to arbitration when their daughter checked the box for an Uber eats order. An appellate court upheld the dismissal because, again, Uber is Uber. In this case, Uber doesn’t have any reputation to protect, so they did not back down. Uber said that even though the couple’s minor daughter was the one that checked the Uber Eats box, Georgia agreed to Uber’s terms of service on multiple occasions when she used the ride app. Credit: CNN

In the case of the Uber lawsuit things are more murky because it was not clear if Georgia or her daughter ordered the food and other reasons.

BUT, in any case, when we agree to those terms of service on apps, usually without reading them, do we understand what we are giving up?

My guess is that, in the first case, the couple had no clue that signing up for a Disney+ trial would legally impact their rights if they went, years later, to DisneyWorld.

Big companies assume that consumers don’t read what they are agreeing to and this, of course, affects corporate users as well. Their employees may agree to terms of service that the company would never agree to. And which, the employee really doesn’t have the authority to bind the company to. Even in this case, it could cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to undo the damage caused by the employee clicking “I Agree”.

Consider yourself warned.

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