The process is the punishment. Average Joe cannot go toe-to-toe in the legal system as it stands right now. The one with the most money nearly always wins, and - as in this case - the threat of financially ruinous litigation is enough.
This is true in American elections too. I can’t remember the exact number, but something like 80% (or more) of elections are won by the candidate with more money.
When everything is tied to money like this - legal, democracy etc, the little guy is always going to lose
Of course you would. For example, thanks to copyright law, Linksys was forced to share their Linux customizations to run on router hardware, which led to the creation of the OpenWRT project.
Without copyright law, any actor can take your open system and close it.
> You wouldn't need it if copyright didn't exist in the first place
No popular open source license that I am aware of attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation:
If there was no copyright, you could not force anybody to provide the source code of any derivative work (situation for copyleft licenses). On the other hand, in a no-copyright situation, you are not able to sue anybody who attempts to reverse-engineer such a derived binary blob and publish the reverse-engineered source code.
Thus, an open-source license that attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation would in my opinion have clauses like the following:
- you are allowed to create binary-only derived works, and are allowed to sell copies of it
- you must not sue anybody who redistributes these copies (even for money)
- you must not disallow any licensees to reverse-engineer these executables
- you must not disallow any owner of a copy to create any derivative work (even using reverse-engineering techni, as long as this work is licenses under this license. This in particular means that, if you create a derivative work, you have to take care that you cannot redistribute copies that (statically) link the work with parts for which this is disallowed
"Free Software" requires making source code available to users. If copyright didn't exist, there would not even be a hypothetical mechanism to require that of publishers.
> The problem is that companies generally know more than customers about an arbitrator’s record and thus are likely to strike out arbitrators who are more inclined to rule in favor of consumers. On average, each securities firm in the study had been involved in 81 other arbitrations. In non-securities disputes, such as those with cellular carriers, the average company had been in 133 hearings. By contrast, most consumers have never been involved in a previous arbitration and tend to strike arbitrators randomly. As a result, the firms’ informational advantage leads to systematically biased outcomes.
> the company still has a big advantage in arbitration
Not as big as in litigation. Yes, companies have familiarity. But the win rates in arbitration are way more favourable. Because you can’t starve your opponent as a strategy.
> Win rates are one aspect. Win amounts are another
For JAMS and AAA, compared to federal courts, after accounting for litigation costs, on average, no. (At the tails, yes. But this doesn't apply if you can pull off federal litigation.) Do you have research to the contrary?
If the arbiter is publicly funded and therefore without bias, sure. In the UK that is ACAS. If the business you have a problem with is paying for its own arbitration service then you are automatically on the back foot.
The problem is more firms having a voice in selecting the arbitrator than them paying for it [1]. TL; DR If you're going into arbitration, don't be passive about the selection process.
