It was binding arbitration. AFAIK every state permits this, probably with variations. In some states for decade. The parties agree to give the court the some or all of the same powers as a government court. In some places there are religious courts that are given these powers by the parties. Generally they go by the laws of the state they live in, but the parties can agree to a different set of laws unless such laws are against "public policy". That's rare to non-existent, but the Branch Dividians probably couldn't be approved to use their rules for arbitration.
It takes some of the burden off the government courts/.
It's not mediation, which only provides advice by a neutral party.
Court stenographers are expensive. And often a waste of money when appeals are not permitted, as is usually the case in small claims. And even govermnent courts now often only have audio or video recordings.
In this state, the judge must have the power to issue restraining orders or he wouldn't do it. The judges are usually lawyers, often with a history as judges in government courts.
I think at first they said what state they were in, but I guess to maximize the TV audience, some don't know.
The People's Court has been on tv for 30+ years, is in NYS and originally just had parties from NYS, mostly NYC. But I think they look for cases out of the ordinary, weirdo cases, like the one you found, and now they take parties from outside the state. Originally, the first judge, Wapner, would actually cite the statute number and read the statute on which he based his decision, a NYS statute. After he left the show, later ones don't do that.
There are at least 10 of these shows on tv, maybe 20 (I'd never heard of this one.) . Cheap to produce because I don't think there are any rehearsals. They are no scripts, no lines to learn, because they are real litigants. Saves a lot of time. I don't know who pays for transportation and hotel. By comparisons, AIUI, those appearing on game shows in California have to pay for that stuff themselves.
Judge Maybelline, Judge Judy (annoys me, but popular), 2 others named after the judge, People's Court (which is the best one.), Divorce Court, I ttink there is Paternity Court (where the advantage is, I'm sure, that the tv show pays for the DNA testing, which I suspect is expensive. Sometimes the guy wants to be the father and sometimes he wants not to be.) The one you point to. Judge Judy's husband used to have his own show.
Most cases would otherwise be in small claims court, where no lawyers are required (except for corporations, that don't really exist and can only speak through a lawyer. At least that was the rule at first but iiuc law suits became a way to almost extort the corporation, sometiems a small family business, which would have to pay a lawyer for half a day or more at hundred dollars an hour so it was cheaper to settle. Now aiui in most states very small corporations don not need a lawyer in small claims court and certainly not in TV courts. BTW, most people on Usenet are old enough to know this but small claims courts didn't exist until the 60's or 70's. I think people just sucked it up.
I don't think any of these shows deal with child custody, but mostly money.
Watching the video (I like these shows and used to tape the People's Court, but not anymore) I see that on this show, the seal of the state of Florida is in the background. So I'm sure they use Florida laws.
Although since there is no appeal, because the parties agree to that, if a judge made a mistake, you'd probably be stuck. Read the contract.
I didn't know there were still places in the USA that didn't just sell unlimited internet.
Decades ago, before an international trip, I bought my first laptop and the night before I was to leave, I was trying to load it. I had dial-up or dsl. Of course I could copy everything to a usb drive, if they existed then, but I found I could connect to some neighbor's wifi and it made things go much faster. I know he didn't have to pay extra.
By the time I got home, iirc, he had a password on it. I was very lucky.
Any "unlimited" Internet is actually limited. Any time the transit bandwidth you're using, is more than the value of the account monthly billing, you're going to "receive a letter" about your "excess usage". For example, on some Internet here, the limit used to be 400GB a month. The "Unlimited" account now might be like 1TB -- it just does not state it that way.
A picture hosting site, may have rented server space for a reasonably fee. It may have included an "unlimited" service. Well, when the server ran up a $30,000.00 bill for the ISP, the ISP just sent the $30K invoice straight to the customer, just like that. So much for "unlimited". The site had to add advertising to their offering, to cover off charges.
It turns out "water is wet" and "gravity is a thing".
If a deal is too good to believe, you're going to find out what the deal really was, soon enough. Any time the Internet charge starts to exceed the monthly billing, you've painted a target on yourself. A "nice" ISP might send you a friendly warning not to do that, almost immediately. But some are quite happy to have you step in pooh and "get a bill at the end of the month". Imagine the shocked look on your face, if you open a letter and it says "you owe us thirty thousand". That would spoil your whole day. I don't think there are enough quarters under sofa cushions to cover that.
My ISP (BT, in the UK) has hotspots all over the place. These are simply other people's routers, which have been pre-configured with a public channel on a standard SSID. They're pretty loud; I've used a few. You login with your usual BT ID.
It is possible to remove the public channels, but very few do that, not knowing how.
My personal opinion is that I like it; very sociable. But I can see how some asshole might find it good fun to monopolise his neighbour's wifi with massive downloads.
Here, Xfinity (Comcast) has something like that. It's mostly for their own customers and I forget how it is for others. I have a tendency to go on out of town trips without taking the address of where I'm going, and 10 or 20 years ago I drove to Pennsylvania and had to find some hotspot like that to look up where the hamfest was. It must have been before smartphones.
This past March, I was away for a week and in a parking lot at Walmart in Florida and I had time to use my computer for the first time, and before I had turned on hotspot on my phone, the laptop downloaded my email using an unlocked xfinity hotspot (even though I still don't have that). When I turned on my hotspot I could see that it worked at 3x the speed or more. Walmart lets people park over night, even in campers. This lot had about 100 cars there all night, in a lot that held 800 or 1000. Some must have been workers working inside the store, but at least a couple, plus me, were sleeping in their car. I don't know who the other cars belonged to.
For what it's worth, Richard Stallman of GNU has said that it is unethical for us to keep our wireless services private, and that we should keep them open so that anyone can use them.
I hope you noticed he took a double-pronged attack approach :
He claims he's allowed to use whatever enters his home*. Well, it stopped coming thru the wall, so there is nothing he could use anymore. Case closed.
I would like to see him claim so with his gas, water and electricity. :-)
But the second part is that he somehow seems to demand "payment" for the "loud music" he claims he was subjected to. I've not seen anything about his audacity of that after-the-fact demand.
I also have not seen the judge tell the guy to pay for all his time (years?) of leeching.
And no, I don't enjoy watching court cases (on youtube or otherwise). Sorry.
By the way, if you like stories like that - people claiming all kinds rights from others - you might enjoy
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. A warning though : there are also a lot of "feel good" stories in there. You can just skip them ofcourse. :-)
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