clickwrap – Attorney Evan Brown

October 19, 2024 Contracts, Litigation

Online agreement to arbitrate not enforceable

website terms and conditions

Plaintiff sued defendant gaming company alleging violation of Washington state laws addressing gambling and consumer protection. Plaintiff claimed that after starting with free chips in defendant’s online casino games, users had to buy more chips to keep playing. Plaintiff had spent money on the games and argued that defendant’s practices were unfair.

Defendant moved to dismiss the case and asked the court to compel arbitration. Defendant argued that plaintiff had agreed to defendant’s terms of service, which included an arbitration clause. The company claimed that by playing the games, plaintiff was bound to these terms, even though plaintiff did not explicitly sign a contract.

The court denied the motion to dismiss. It found that defendant did not provide enough information to show that plaintiff had been given proper notice of the terms of service or that he agreed to them. The notice on the game’s homepage was not clear or conspicuous enough for a reasonable person to understand that they were agreeing to the terms, including arbitration, just by playing the games.

Three reasons why this case matters:

Consumer Protection: It highlights the importance of businesses providing clear and understandable terms to consumers.
Online Contracts: The case shows that courts are careful when it comes to online agreements, requiring companies to ensure consumers are fully aware of the terms.
Arbitration Clauses: This case reinforces that arbitration clauses must be clearly presented and agreed upon to be enforceable.

Kuhk v. Playstudios, Inc., 2024 WL 4529263 (W.D. Washington, October 18, 2024)

January 26, 2024 Contracts, Litigation

Click to Agree: Online clickwrap agreements steered bank lawsuit to arbitration

online terms and conditions

Plaintiffs sued their bank alleging various claims under state law. The bank moved to compel arbitration based on various online clickwrap agreements plaintiffs had entered into.

One of the clickwrap agreements required plaintiffs to scroll through the entire agreement and then click an “Acknowledge” button before continuing to the next step. Citing to the case of Meyer v. Uber, 868 F.3d 66 (2d Cir. 2017), the court observed that “[c]ourts routinely uphold clickwrap agreements for the principal reason that the user has affirmatively assented to the terms of agreement by clicking ‘I agree.'”

Similarly, for the other relevant agreements, plaintiffs were required to click a box acknowledging that they agreed to those agreements before they could obtain access to digital products. Again, citing to the Meyer case: “A reasonable user would know that by clicking the registration button, he was agreeing to the terms and conditions accessible via the hyperlink, whether he clicked on the hyperlink or not.” By affirmatively clicking the acknowledgement, plaintiffs manifested their assent to the terms of the these agreements.

Curtis v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., 2024 WL 283474 (S.D.N.Y., January 25, 2024)

Arbitration provision in web-based contract was not enforceable

Defendants moved to compel arbitration based upon a purported arbitration clause in an agreement between them and plaintiffs that plaintiffs electronically signed through defendants’ website.

The court found that defendants failed to meet their burden to show, by undisputed material facts, that the parties entered into an agreement to arbitrate the claims in the case. The court looked to the Ninth Circuit decision in Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble Inc., 763 F.3d 1171 (9th Cir. 2014) to support the idea that courts will enforce clickwrap-type agreements where the user indicates actual notice of the terms of the agreement or was required to acknowledge the terms of the agreement before proceeding with further use of the site. Enforcement of a browsewrap-type agreement, which lacks such an acknowledgment, will depend upon whether the website’s design and content would put “a reasonably prudent user on inquiry notice of the terms of the contract.” The conspicuousness of the terms and notices, as well as the overall design of the webpage, will contribute to the determination that a user was on inquiry notice.

In this case, according to the court, defendants had not offered evidence explaining the design and content of the webpage in question, or how the agreement appeared on the website. The court could not determine whether the terms of the agreement appeared on the registration page itself, or if a user would have had to click a link to see the full terms. Likewise, the court could not determine other factors that might contribute to determining plaintiffs’ notice of the terms, such as the size of the font or other aspects of the appearance and presentation of the terms online. The declaration offered by defendant did not provide evidence to show that: (1) either of the plaintiffs had actual knowledge of the arbitration agreement; or (2) whether the agreement was a clickwrap or a browsewrap agreement, how the website was designed and where these terms appeared, and whether plaintiffs assented by clicking an “I agree” box, or were deemed to agree by continuing in the registration process.

Given the lack of evidence of how the registration process appeared on its website, how one of the plaintiffs had declared that he did not see an arbitration agreement, and the reasonable doubts and inferences that must be drawn in that plaintiff’s favor under the applicable standard, the court found that plaintiffs had presented a genuine issue of fact concerning notice of, and assent to, the arbitration agreement here. The court could not find that plaintiffs were reasonably on notice of the agreement to arbitrate, and the accordingly the motion to compel was denied.

Chen v. Premier Financial Alliance, Inc., 2019 WL 280944 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 22, 2019)

November 14, 2017 Contracts

Plaintiff could not have agreed to arbitrate claims over website before the website was even created

Ticketmaster.com terms of use did not govern claims arising from related ticket exchange website

Plaintiff sued defendants Ticketmaster and Live Nation asserting violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act and a similar state law. He claimed that Ticketmaster’s NFL Ticket Exchange website did not provide information about wheelchair-accessible seating. Defendants filed a motion asking the court to compel the parties to arbitrate the case. The court denied the motion.

Neither party argued that the terms and conditions of the Ticket Exchange website governed the dispute between them. Defendants instead argued that the clickwrap agreement governing previous purchases defendant had made from ticketmaster.com for concerts applied to plaintiff’s use of the Ticket Exchange website.

This clickwrap agreement contained an arbitration provision that changed over time. Before November 2012, the provision contained broad language stating that the parties “agree[d] to arbitrate all disputes and claims between [them].” The language after November 2012 limited the arbitration provision to any “dispute or claim relating in any way to [plaintiff’s] use of the Site, or to products or services sold or distributed by … or through [defendants].” The definition of “Site” did not include the Ticket Exchange website.

The court rejected defendants’ arguments that the ticketmaster.com terms of service governed plaintiff’s use of the Ticket Exchange website.

The pre-November 2012 terms governed only “the use of ticketmaster.com and mobile versions thereof.” The court observed that at the time, the Ticket Exchange website did not yet exist, and that ticketmaster.com contained a “section” serving the same purpose as the now-existing Ticket Exchange website. Accordingly, the court held that plaintiff would not be deemed to have agreed to arbitrate claims relating to his use of a website before the website was even created.

As to the November 2012-onward terms, the court easily determined those did not apply, as they did, by their own terms, apply only to the Site (which did not include Ticket Exchange). And since Plaintiff had made no purchase on the Ticket Exchange website, the scope of the terms purporting to cover “products or services sold or distributed by … or through [defendants]” still failed to reach the Ticket Exchange website.

Long v. Live Nation Worldwide, 2017 WL 5194978 (W.D. Wash., November 9, 2017)

About the Author: Evan Brown is a Chicago technology and intellectual property attorney. Call Evan at (630) 362-7237, send email to ebrown [at] internetcases.com, or follow him on Twitter @internetcases. Read Evan’s other blog, UDRP Tracker, for information about domain name disputes.

January 21, 2016 Licensing

On avoiding anxiety-inducing words in online terms of service

Are “worldwide” “perpetual” rights really necessary?

Designer/developer Robert Nealan wrote a post questioning whether self-hosted blogging is dead. The piece is interesting as a commentary on the current state of blogging in general — a state that has changed a lot in the past decade or more, primarily due to the influences of outside social platforms, namely, Twitter, and more recently, as Robert notes and critiques, Medium.

The piece is a refreshing singing of praise for self-hosted blogs (like the one you’re reading). But another, no less important element of the post is an undercurrent shaped by a not-unjustified freak out of sorts over what third party platforms’ online terms of service say about their claim of rights in the users’ intellectual property. When we look to the terms of service for some of these platforms (and even more so if we actually think about what those terms say), we recognize that platforms quite often over-aggressively grab onto rights to do things with the content the user posts. So much depends on how these terms of service are written.

Lawyers can learn a lot from the commentary like that Robert Nealan has posted. As an object lesson and example, he takes issue with Svbtle’s terms, particularly the following:

Marketing. As a paid customer, you give Svbtle a perpetual world-wide license to use your company’s assets and logos, unless Svbtle agrees in writing otherwise. These assets and logos will be used purely for marketing and sales efforts, such as being displayed on the home page.

Good practice here would might consider adopting the ethos of certain “by design” concepts we see in the privacy and data security world. Think of “privacy by design” or “security by design” — the idea that a technology developer (e.g., someone building an app) should build the system in a way that it does not keep data around for longer than what is needed, and certainly for no longer than what the developer promises its users it will.

The same could be applied here — and it seems even simpler — for platforms to adopt principles establishing they will only exercise rights in relation to users’ intellectual property for only as long as they meaningfully need to do so. Let’s call it “Appropriate Rights by Design“. Words like “perpetual” and “world-wide” can be frightening. A platform hosting users’ content probably doesn’t need such extensive rights. If that’s the case, then the platform shouldn’t grab those rights. Those terms can be a red-herring. Robert Nealan took comfort in his piece in Medium’s terms which say that users of Medium “own the rights to the content [they] post on Medium,” and that Medium “[doesn’t claim ownership over any of it.” Funny thing is, a platform that grabs a world-wide, perpetual license could truthfully say the very same thing. So by not grabbing more rights than necessary, i.e., applying principles of Appropriate Rights by Design, platforms will avoid having users latch on to scary words unnecessarily. For as long as this happens, it’s likely users will continue to have anxiety about moving to a third-party hosted platform, and in the same way, keep a light shining on what’s good about self-hosted blogs and other platforms.

Evan Brown is a Chicago attorney advising enterprises on important aspects of technology law, including software development, technology and content licensing, and general privacy issues.

Photo courtesy Flickr user fady habib under this Creative Commons license.

October 23, 2015 Contracts, Evidence

Want your online agreements to be enforceable? Keep good transaction data.

Chicago internet attorney Evan Brown

A recent court decision underscores the importance of building online e-commerce platforms with the ability to reliably gather information about transactions. The case also says some troubling things about open source.

Plaintiff loaned money in exchange for the borrower assigning its accounts receivable to plaintiff. As part of plaintiff’s services, it provided a platform for its borrower to generate and send invoices to the borrower’s customers. The borrower began generating fake invoices, and one of its customers — the defendant in this case — refused to pay. There was a dispute over whether defendant had accepted or rejected the invoices using plaintiff’s invoice platform.

After a trial, the judge ruled in favor of defendant. The court found that the digital data showing whether defendant had accepted or rejected the invoices was unreliable. The court found credible the testimony of one of defendant’s employees that he never clicked “I agree” on the fraudulent invoices. And there was no good database evidence that he had.

Plaintiff sought review with the Court of Appeal of California. On appeal, the court affirmed, agreeing that the data was unreliable, and further commenting on the problematic use of open source software in plaintiff’s online invoice platform.

The court of appeal found that substantial evidence supported the lower court’s findings. Specifically, it agreed with the lower court’s findings that the defendant’s employee never clicked on the “I agree” button to accept the fraudulent invoices. The court also credited the lower court’s finding that the data was unreliable in part because plaintiff’s website was developed from open source code, and that the developer made untested changes to the software on a weekly basis.

The treatment of the open source aspect is perhaps unfortunate. One unfamiliar with open source would read the court’s opinion as an indictment against open source software’s fundamental reliability:

Open source code is problematic because anonymous people on the internet design it, and “holes” are not fixed by vendor updates. Notifications that there are issues with the code may not go out.

The lack of reliability of the data in this case was not due to the fundamental nature of open source. (We know that open source software, e.g., Linux, powers essential core features of the modern internet.) So it is unfortunate that future litigants may look to this case to argue against vendors who use open source solutions. Fortunately, the case is not citable as precendent (many California Court of Appeal cases are not citable). But the court’s negative treatment of the nature of open source is a troubling example of how a judge may be swayed by a technological red herring.

21st Capital Corp. v. Onodi Tooling & Engineering Co., 2015 WL 5943097 (Not officially published, California Court of Appeal, October 13, 2015)

Evan Brown is a Chicago attorney advising enterprises on important aspects of technology law, including software development, technology and content licensing, and general privacy issues.

Photo by Flickr user bookfinch under this Creative Commons license.

December 29, 2014 Contracts

Forum selection clause in browsewrap agreement did not bind parties in bitcoin fraud case

We all know that clickwrap agreements are preferable to browsewrap agreements, assuming, of course, the objective is to establish binding contracts between participants in online transactions. Nonetheless, some online platforms still (try to) rely on browsewrap agreements to establish terms of service. That avoidance of best practices gives us situations like the recent case of Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, in which a federal court in Illinois refused to enforce a forum selection clause in a “bitcoin to gold marketplace” browsewrap agreement.

Plaintiff alleged that he sent about $175,000 worth of bitcoins to defendants in June 2013, expecting to get gold in return. (Plaintiff alleges he transferred 1,644.54 BTC. The average exchange value in June 2013 was $107.82/BTC. You can get historical bitcoin price data here: http://www.coindesk.com/price) When the gold never arrived, plaintiff sued for fraud.

Defendants moved to dismiss, citing a forum selection clause contained in a browsewrap agreement found on its website. That purported agreement required all disputes to be heard in the state courts of Wyoming, and for Wyoming law to apply. The court denied the motion to dismiss, finding that the browsewrap agreement afforded plaintiff neither actual nor constructive knowledge of its terms and conditions.

The court observed that the hyperlink that directed users to defendants’ Terms of Service was listed among ten other hyperlinks at the bottom of each page. (See this Wayback Machine capture of the website from June 2013).

As for lack of actual knowledge, the court credited plaintiff’s allegations that he did not review or even know of defendants’ Terms of Service when he entered the bitcoin transaction. And there was no evidence to the contrary in the record.

And as for lack of constructive knowledge, the court found that the hyperlink, “buried at the bottom of the webpage – [was] without some additional act of notification, insufficient for the purpose of providing reasonable notice.”

Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, No. 14-5735, 2014 WL 7261240 (N.D. Ill. December 19, 2014)

Megaupload takedown reminds us why website terms and conditions can be important

Kashmir Hill pointed out that at least one erstwhile file sharing service has changed its business model in response to the federal government’s action against Megaupload. She observes that:

FileSonic users can’t be too happy to have one of the main features of the site taken away. But the company must be less worried about its breach of contract with existing users than it is about the possibility of getting the Megaupload treatment, i.e., arrest, seizure of its property, and a criminal indictment.

This raises an important point. Any kind of online service that pushes the legal envelope may want to build in some mechanisms to pull back with impunity if it gets freaked out or loses its envelope-pushing courage. Said another way, that service should not make promises to its users that it cannot keep in the event the service wants to change what it is doing.

Some well known user generated content sites do this pretty well already in their terms of service. For example:

Dropbox: “We reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice.”
“YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time.”
Reddit: “We also reserve the right to discontinue the Program, or change the content or formatting of the Program, at any time without notice to you, and to require the immediate cessation of any specific use of the Program.”
Facebook (being kind of vague): “If you . . . create risk or possible legal exposure for us, we can stop providing all or part of Facebook to you.”

All good examples of foresight in drafting website terms and conditions that help innovative sites with damage control.

December 18, 2011 Contracts

Court enforces online terms and conditions incorporated by reference in invoices

Clickwrap and browsewrap agreements are not the only enforceable online contracts.

Fadal Machining Centers, LLC v. Compumachine, Inc., 2011 WL 6254979 (9th Cir. December 15, 2011)

Plaintiff manufacturer sued one of its distributors over unpaid invoices. Defendant moved to dismiss, citing to an arbitration provision in the terms and conditions on plaintiff’s website. The district court dismissed the complaint and plaintiff sought review with the Ninth Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed.

It held that the district court did not err in concluding an arbitration agreement existed between the parties. Though the language of the hard copy distribution agreement did not address arbitration, it provided that plaintiff could unilaterally establish terms of sale from time to time. Each invoice referred to plaintiff’s website’s terms and conditions. The court found that these referred-to terms and conditions “clearly and unmistakably delegated the question of arbitrability to an arbitrator.”

The decision supports the notion that contracting parties (particularly merchants selling goods) may rely on provisions not spelled out in any documents exchanged between them, but appearing online and incorporated by reference. In other words, certain online contracts other than clickwrap and browsewrap agreements may be enforceable.

September 6, 2011 Contracts

Website terms and conditions were unenforceable because of fraud

Duick v. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., 2011 WL 3834740 (Cal.App. 2 Dist. August 31, 2011)

Someone signed plaintiff up through a Toyota website to take part in a “Personality Evaluation.” She got an email with a link to a website, and on the second page that she had to click through, she was presented with the well-known check box next to the words “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions.”

Later plaintiff started getting creepy emails from an unknown male calling himself “Sebastian Bowler” who indicated that he was on a cross-country road trip to come and visit plaintiff. He even listed plaintiff’s physical address. One of the emails had a link to Bowler’s MySpace page, which revealed he “enjoyed drinking alcohol to excess.” A few days later plaintiff got another email from someone purporting to be the manager of the hotel in which Bowler had trashed a room, and attempted to bill plaintiff for the damage.

As one would expect, plaintiff was disturbed by these messages. She finally got an email with a link to a video that said Bowler was a fictional character and that the emails were part of an elaborate prank, all to advertise the Toyota Matrix.

Plaintiff sued Toyota for, among other things, infliction of emotional distress. Toyota moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the online terms and conditions contained an arbitration provision, so the case did not belong in court but before an arbitrator. The court rejected this argument, finding that the terms and conditions were void, because plaintiff’s agreement to them was procured by “fraud in the inception or execution.”

The court found that the terms and conditions led plaintiff to believe that she was going to participate in a personality evaluation and nothing more. A reasonable reader in plaintiff’s position would not have known that she was signing up to be the target of a prank. For example, the terms and conditions were under the heading “Personality Evaluation Terms and Conditions” and made vague and opaque references to terms such as “interactive experience” and a “digital experience.” Simply stated, plaintiff, through no fault of her own, did not know what she was getting herself into.

For these reasons, the court held that the terms and conditions were void, and all the provisions contained in those terms and conditions, including the purported agreement to arbitrate any disputes, did not bind the parties.