The clause, headed Binding Individual Arbitration, reads: "Any dispute resolution proceedings, whether in arbitration or in court, will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class or representative action...unless both you and the Sony entity with which you have a dispute specifically agree to do so in writing following initiation of the arbitration."
The move follows Sony's recent coalescence of its online services under one banner, Sony Entertainment Network, and is clearly designed with the aftermath of the April attack on PSN in mind.
Following the attack, which resulted in the personal data of over 100 million users being compromised, Sony was hit with several class-action lawsuits. The first was filed in April by Alabama resident Kristopher Johns, 36, who accused Sony of failing to take "reasonable care to protect, encrypt and secure the private and sensitive data of its users."
In May, a Canadian law firm initiated class-action proceedings, seeking a billion dollars in damages, and that was followed in June by a San Diego filing which accused Sony of laying off "a substantial percentage" of Sony Online Entertainment staff a fortnight before the attack.
That, however, may be the tip of the iceberg. In July, one of Sony's insurers, Zurich American, asked a court to rule it was not liable for Sony's mounting legal defence costs. Its filing claimed that Sony was facing 55 separate lawsuits over its handling of the PSN outage.
While the clause sounds unenforcable, it has legal precedent. In May, the US Supreme Court ruled that mobile operator AT&T was entitled to block customers from binding together to bring class-action lawsuits, despite lower levels of the US legal system having branded its attempt to do so as "unconscionable."
Source: http://www.next-gen.biz/news/sony-blocks-class-action-suits-new-online-terms
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