> The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
You're conveniently omitting the fact it's a self driving car prototype and that the safety driver is supposed to catch failures.
The driverless car that very much had a safety driver, which got distracted because she was watching TV shows on her phone?
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
I don't see how that's a relevant point less those safety devices are mandatory. If my windshield broke, I was too lazy to fix it, and that resulted in auto-braking not working, then I was involved in an accident that could have been stopped with auto-braking, should I get extra flak because I didn't have auto-braking, even though it's not mandated?
>The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
The OP was talking about criminal responsibility. Obviously they should be responsible in civil court and pay damages, same as if UPS had one of its drivers crash into some kid. But should they be criminally responsible?
We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.
Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.
I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
You can’t dump your passengers on the freeway, for any reason. It’s not safe for them or for the other drivers on the road.
What’s not in question is that the two women were extremely intoxicated to the point of vomiting on themselves. The PDF alleges that one of the women shouted that there was an emergency, which is what originally caused the driver to pull over where he did.
It’s still not clear to me how much of this was the driver forcing them out and leaving them, and how much was they got out, refused to pay the cleaning fee, and so he just left them.
We aren’t getting clear views of what happened at all from the two people left alive.
If somebody needed help, the driver may very well have to decided to stop ASAP, at the same gore point, and the women could have then chosen to immediately get out, and one of them would have gotten killed. Literally nothing would have changed.
Indeed, it sounds like one of the women was shouting there was an emergency, so the driver stopped. That is effectively "I need help". What would your button do any differently?
My point is: where do we draw the line? Intoxicated people are going to act irrationally and at what point does “low paid person who shuttles people from point A to point B” become responsible for the actions of their riders?
It’s still unclear how much of this was “forced out of the car” and “got out to argue and refused to get back in”, the timeline of events is incredibly muddy (as the linked PDF agrees) and having dealt with very intoxicated people I can easily imagine the challenges the driver (who doesn’t appear to speak English well or at all given they needed a translator in the arbitration) faced dealing with 2 drunk and irrational passengers.
Let me be crystal clear, I don’t at all think “oh well, someone died”. But attacking the driver isn’t going to fix the system that caused this.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place, to the person who is actually choosing to do it.
The platform enables anyone to interact with clients having minimal training except a drivers license. They are operating as agents of the corporation just classified as adjunct “gig workers.” Read: a loop hole to abdicate responsibility and blame the workers while the company makes money on them with minimal overhead.
Imagine an app where anyone could be an underpaid nurse, and said nurse poisons a patient with fentanyl. Who’s to blame then? The company for lack of oversight or the nurse? Or both?
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.
You think they don't?
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.
> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".
And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.
They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.
No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.
A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.
To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.
Every other answer is bullshit.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
Yes I considered independent wheels but a basic trailer is $3k, which doesn't leave much room for anything complicated.
The point is there's a million of these edge cases for which autonomy will not economically compete for another hundred years.
The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)
Measurement matters here.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
Throwing out our whole legal system because sometimes the lawyers make the most money is reductionist at best.
With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.
There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).
> All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.
A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).
And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.
Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.
That's weird. Two things can be true at once: arbitrary is better than the American legal system, and the American legal system is better than what 80% of the global population live under.
> All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, [...]
It is! You explicitly have to opt in, that's why Uber needs have it in their ToS that you accept. They can't just force it on you, when you have no contractual relationship with them.
"opt in" - as part of a 300 page TOS that you never read, that is modified 4 times annually and you are told to read all 300 pages again.
I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.
Very clear case, arbitration is fine. Fuzzy case, I would much prefer something that doesn't tip the scales in advance.
Note that the same bias problem exists with home inspectors. Realtors won't like inspectors that find things that kill deals. That one can be solved by hiring your own inspector with no input from the realtor.
Even though the car manufacturer does indeed pay for the arbitration, I never felt the arbiter was biased, and the judgement was completely in my favor.
If eg Uber runs you over or bumps your car, you have no contractual relationship with them, and thus they can't force arbitration on you.
That's why they have to write the arbitrary clause into their ToS that they need you to agree on. No forced arbitration.
Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
Letting entities that hold the vast majority of the leverage and financial/legal/political power in a contract opt out of the legal system and pick an alternative with a financial incentive to side with them is perhaps "fair" to you, but a lot of people would disagree on the "enough" part.
It’s one thing to say the legal system is expensive and slow, let’s resolve our issues by a third party, and another thing to where there’s no further action you can take and the arbitration authority is being paid by the company.
Its simply becoming a parallel legal system for a different class.
IMO, no it is not. It should not be legal to force arbitration via ToS.
Make it a public record with other bindings like one ruling applies to all customers etc. then at least it’s a system with transparency.
See, that's why court proceedings are public, so that the public can verify that courts are fair. It's also why judges are appointed by democratically elected politicians. Who appointed your arbitrator?
And of course the court system is bad and unfair in a bunch of ways. But it's starting from a much better place than secret, forced arbitration.
Seems like that's an empirical question.
Companies are not doing this for faster problem resolution, they’re doing this to shield themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
(Which is not to say there's not plenty to dislike about this whole case, including the fact it's forced arbitration...)
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
It does seem they're trying to get out of it somehow.
There was a dispute about whether the amount awarded was confidential or not (Uber contended it was; plaintiff contended it wasn't), but on the face of it, had plaintiff agreed to the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, Uber would have paid up.
I suppose it could be argued that Uber were trying to write in clauses they knew plaintiff wouldn't agree to, but it's not obvious to me that a different plaintiff wouldn't have agreed to confidentiality and non-disparagement.
(FWIW, it's not clear to me whether Uber have now in fact paid up; they made a statement to the Guardian that _suggests_ they have, but the fact that they didn't explicitly say so means I wouldn't want to draw that inference)
It's minor, but they are not accepting the award as-is, they are still trying to negotiating, albeit in a minor way, not by contesting the amount, but a confidentiality clause.
They love to negotiate confidentiality clauses, there's few cases without it, including a case by Mike Rafi's personal injury firm which resulted from an omission by Uber (and later Uber being much more anal about confidentiality). I think it's a strategy to avoid case law catching on.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in blindly defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed because 600+/hour/person is peanuts to them.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
Its not a regurgitation. Its the facts.
It applies to small businesses too.
A mom and pop shop will (or should !) also have ADR clauses in its contracts.
And the court will certainly take a very dim view if you try to sue a mom and pop shop without having tried ADR.
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
In most jurisdictions there are often laws related to unfair contract terms.
And even if there are no such laws, judges remain free to rule clauses and contracts void.
So you might waive that right in theory. But in practice I doubt you'll find it would hold up in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc...
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
I'm not the right person to explain English history, secret courts, and the American revolution. Suffice to say, public courts a vital check on the power of the state by way of the court of public opinion. The real final court of appeal.
Food for thought (not specifically relevant to this case): I wonder how much would go away if the US had universal healthcare, or to put it another way, how much of its legal system is spent figuring out who pays for medical treatment
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
To the extent that you believe it is forced, you can dispute it on a public court, and if you can prove you were forced, you wouldn't be subject to arbitration.
Arbitration in private courts only exists if both parties agree prior to agreeing to the contract to that clause.
If you believe that it's forced because you never read the Terms of Agreement, I feel that's more of a discussion of whether clickwrapped terms are valid or not, it would be a way more radical position to believe that they have absolutely no effect. And if they do have an effect, agreeing to private arbitration is no different.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)
You are probably thinking of patents. For a long time the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) was by far the most popular choice for patent lawsuits by far, especially against big tech companies.
Then there was a Supreme Court decision (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. 258 (2017)) [1]. It made it so corporations can only be sued for patent infringement in the state where they are incorporated or a district where they have both infringed and have a regular and established place of business.
EDTX is largely a rural district with no really major cities. Most big tech companies have no physical offices there.
Many of those cases moved to the Western District of Texas (WDTX). WDTX includes Austin, and a whole lot of big tech has offices there.
There was one judge in Waco whose court was particularly attractive to patent lawsuits, due to having plaintiff-friendly procedures and a rapid trial schedule. 100% of patent cases filed in Waco went to him. In a few years his court was handling 20% of all patents cases in the entire country.
The Supreme Court and Congress did not like so many patent cases being handled by a single judge, and the WDTX Chief Judge making it so patent cases filed in WDTX are random distributed among its 13 judges.
Cases against big tech companies mostly moved to Delaware (where many big tech companies are incorporated) or Northern California.
EDTX regained the number one spot for patent cases after that, although not from big tech cases. Delaware and Northern California remain the big places for those.
EDTX is #1 because even though it is rural and has almost no big tech presence, it still has major retailers, grocery chains, distribution centers, and communication hubs. For patent suits not against big tech it still works fine.
Also, Heartland did not apply to international defendants. They can still be sued in any district in the US.
The biggest reason EDTX is a popular choice if you can pick it is not plaintiffs do particularly well there. It depends on when you look because it has varied quite a bit, but there are often other districts where plaintiffs win more.
The big reasons are:
• Patent litigation is complex, both for the court and the attorneys. Regardless of which side of the case is on you want a court with experience. If the court is inexperienced the case can drag on which is expensive, burning up lots of billable hours of the expensive patent litigation firm you are using. EDTX has many patent experienced judges, and has developed rules and procedures to move cases along.
• In addition to cases moving along efficiently once they get going, the get going faster in EDTX.
Patent suits are civil cases. They take a back seat to criminal cases. EDTX simply does not have much federal crime (or state crime that ends up in federal district courts).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...
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