Quote Originally Posted by tomaO2 View Post
Um, does this mean that it's not a specific California law that is forcing Patreon to pay for all legal fees but, rather, the old terms of services that forced it to be this way?

I guess that would have to be the case, now that I think about it, because I read that the new terms of service are preventing that from happening again. I was sure there was some recent California law that made this lawsuit suddenly practical...

Any idea why Patreon missed a loophole like this?
From what I can see so far, they didn't miss the loophole, they put it in. In pretty much any situation where one party is a bigger entity that enters into the same general contract with a lot of other parties, it's that one big guy who actually drafts the contract in question. It's simply more efficient if their thousands or millions of contracts aren't individualized more than absolutely necessary, and in that case it would be weird if their first client drafted a contract, Patreon accepted, and then liked it so much that they used it as their offer for every other client they have.

As I mentioned earlier, they probably have a reason to do so. In these relationships, there's a practical limit to how much the company can negotiate with individuals, so the meta-negotiation is pretty much sitting down the with lawyers, and figuring out a contract that gives you what you absolutely need, while hopefully not scaring off too many potential partners/clients/users/etc. That's why this case is interesting to me. Very one sided, "If the company prevails, you pay our legal fees. If you prevail, you don't pay our fees but you still pay your own" provisions are so common that they generate mild outrage but few real concessions by the big companies who use them.

So Patreon having doing the same, or having no fee-shifting at all, wouldn't have raised an eyebrow on its own. So I really have no clue why they decided to go out of their way to give what is essentially a huge concession to everyone. My best guess is that they figured that enough creators or patrons have been burned by similar clauses in the past that they're more wary than the typical customer, and being able to point to how they're different was an important of their business strategy. Whether they now still think it was a worthwhile concession is an open question.