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The Court Enforced Facebook's Terms Of Use And Based On A Venue Clause

Good Essays

Professor Goldman blogged recently about a case involving Facebook where the court enforced Facebook’s terms of use and based on a venue clause in Facebook’s terms transferred a dispute from New York to California. The court delved into (and seemed to get bogged down in) the distinctions between clickwrap and browsewrap agreements while eventually concluding that the plaintiff was apprised of the terms (or should have been) so there was no reason not to enforce the contract. Kwan v. Clearwire doesn’t involve strictly online terms, but Clearwire was not so lucky. It botched its terms of use (judging from the court’s order it also botched its customer service efforts). End result: it can’t summarily move the dispute to arbitration and has to …show more content…

The Clearwire terms contained a class action waiver and an arbitration clause, and Clearwire sought to have the dispute arbitrated pursuant to the Clearwire terms.

Brown signed up for a 14 day trial of Clearwire. She received a confirmation email from Clearwire one week prior to receiving her modem. She tried to connect her modem but was unsuccessful, and she alleged that she was not required to click any sort of acknowledgement before trying to connect her modem. She called Clearwire to cancel her service, but was persuaded by Clearwire to renew her trial period. Clearwire had a service technician check on Brown’s modem. The technician arrived while Brown was at work and Brown’s roommate left the technician alone to try to get the modem working. After the technician left, she tried to get the modem working, and it still would not work properly. According to Brown, she discovered that “use of her microwave interfered with her modem signal.” She tried to cancel her service, and after going back and forth with Clewrwire, Clearwire finally agreed that she could cancel her service. Clearwire sent her shipping labels to return the modem, but according to her, by the time she received the shipping labels from Clearwire, the labels had “expired.” This prompted another round of back-and-forth with Clearwire’s customer service. Ultimately, she was able to return the modem to Clewarwire.

Reasonover’s experience with Clearwire wasn’t much better. She signed up

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