Almost no chargeback will ever go to arbitration though. So it's not like this new fee is the reason behind the change. Patrick Collison is (probably) just exploiting his position in the market to squeeze more money out of merchants.
I sure wish there was more competition in the payment marketplace. During the early Stripe years, I thought Patrick would be above this nonsense (even without competitive pressure). Not so!
I think it's more about running up the legal bill of the defendant. It costs virtually nothing to include a spurious claim in a complaint (it can literally be a sentence or two). The defense has the burden of getting the weak claim dismissed with pages and pages of arguments (because they don't want any chance of it slipping through).
The bar for a "shotgun" complaint is way too high in the legal system.
I would agree. I'm the defendant in a (frivolous) trademark infringement case and my firm (which does work for the EFF) averages about 2 hours per (substantial) page, at a rate of $500/hour. I do wonder in the back of my mind if I'm being taken to the cleaners...
Small businesses do not routinely send pennies to the UAE. Countries do not have unlimited resources to chase after you. The law cannot be universally enforced, so the government has to pick and choose its battles. And they aren't going to bother with you. You need to be concerned about the tax law in the country you reside and have citizenship.
If you are the target of automated copyright trolling, inspect your server logs whenever you get a notice. Some troll bots will (surprisingly) use an honest HTTP user agent so you can easily block it.
Someone tell this to the US Census Bureau please. They send you threatening letters demanding you fill out a survey ("Your response is REQUIRED by law"), but then block every non-US ISP from accessing it. I wrote my congresswoman, the US Digital Service (it was a hail mary) and Kevin Deardorff (the "chief" of the particular survey I have to take), and no one cares about the millions of Americans abroad.
I could probably sign up for a VPN service and take it, but then again, they could be blocking VPN services too.
> Friedman wrote, “implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny.” (Of course, Kennedy had said that Americans should not ask what their country could do for them. But never mind. It’s that kind of book.)
It's hard to take this article seriously when it makes a glaring mistake analyzing the first two paragraphs of Friedman's book. Friedman was critiquing both statements in Kennedy's famous line ("Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.")
I sure wish there was more competition in the payment marketplace. During the early Stripe years, I thought Patrick would be above this nonsense (even without competitive pressure). Not so!