You Should Really Read Those...

This year marked one of the biggest service shutdowns we've seen in gaming - Sony's Playstation Network. As most of you probably know, they were hacked in April and a large amount of data was accessed, including customer info like addresses and credit card numbers. They had to shut down the service for nearly a month to get things back up and running again. I can't even begin to imagine the headache it caused for everyone working at Sony.

A few months down the line, Sony updated its Playstation 3 firmware and it came with a Terms of Service change. In it, you were agreeing to never engage in a class-action lawsuit against Sony in the future. Of course, this is in response to the outage and shows Sony's legal team finding a devious way to prevent damages against their company in the event of another hack. People all over the Internet were outraged (what a concept, huh?) and various groups were established to help lazy gamers opt-out of the terms and sidestep the problem.

Flash forward to two days ago and the update of Microsoft's Xbox 360 dashboard. Lo and behold, their Terms of Service has changed too, now including a very similar clause within regarding class-action lawsuits. Seeing Sony (and EA after it) get away with it must have convinced lawyers to do the same for their Terms. We can probably expect to see a lot of these popping up in the near future.

Is this illegal? Apparently not, since three major gaming companies have now done this (I remember reading around the time of Sony's that they had checked on the legality of it). Is it morally grey? Probably a little bit although I can't see a corporation of that size caring. I understand that Sony, EA, and Microsoft are just trying to cover the bases in the possibility of a legal matter but it doesn't make it entirely forgivable. Most individuals can't possibly take on a corporation by themselves if necessary and now they can't even try in a group. It's a bit dirty and I encourage you to opt-out if you care enough.

UPDATE(happened after I wrote this):
Apparently, reports are coming in that you can't write in a letter to opt-out from this class-action clause. There is an option for a letter to opt-out but only from future updates. The legality of this is apparently still clean but has me even more worried.