Could United&#39;s upgrade policy be legally interpreted as gambling? United provides Global Premier Upgrades (GPU) to frequent fliers that can be used to upgrade one leg of a flight by one class, e.g., economy to business. However, for international flights, the economy ticket also has to be in minimum fare class ("W" typically), which is often significantly more expensive then the cheapest available ticket at time of booking. It's typically around $200-$300 more per leg. Other than being eligible for an upgrade, the higher fare class has no other benefits. That was actually confirmed to me by an United agent on the phone. The upgrade is also dependent on availability of a special type of tickets (R-space). Availability at time of booking is quite rare on most routes. You can still apply the GPU, but you get wait listed. If R-space becomes available or United doesn't sell all business class seats for cash, they will upgrade by going down the wait list. Often the upgrade does not go through. In this case, the GPU is returned to the customer. However the price difference of the tickets is not. So you have spent $200-$300 for nothing. So in short: at time of booking, you need to decide whether you want to spent extra money for a chance at an upgrade. If you get it, great. If not, the money is gone with no value or benefit and United keeps the cash. Some frequent flier web sites refer to this actually as the "upgrade lottery". I looked at some legal definitions for gambling, and it seems the main ingredients are there. See for example: https://definitions.uslegal.com/g/gambling/, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling You wager money there is an event with uncertain outcome if the the outcome is "good" you have a substantial gain, if the outcome is "bad", you lost your money without any benefit from it. It's a simple "yes"/"no" You have little or no information to predict the outcome at time of wager. You have no control on the outcome
No. This is not gambling. Your quoted and paraphrased definition is especially misleading, since the original definition given on uslegal.com explicitly excepts bona fide business transactions valid under the law of contracts, such as the purchase or sale at a future date of securities or commodities, contracts of indemnity or guaranty and life, health or accident insurance. You pay an extra fee for the privilege of being on a waitlist for selection to an upgrade. That fee and list does not guarantee getting the upgrade any more than the fee and ticket guarantees you will have that seat on board that flight on that day. You only receive the tangible benefit if there is sufficient space and you satisfy the criteria set out by the airline (terms and conditions as provided at booking, policies applied by the airline whether publicly known or not, etc.).
This is an interesting and challenging question, with broad applications. The standard answer is &quot;read the contract&quot;, to which one should reply &quot;show me the contract&quot;. It has to be findable from a web page – a contract can't be a secret document that the accepting party cannot find. At the bottom of their main page, you can find a TOS. It states that This Website is provided solely to assist customers in gathering travel information, determining the availability of travel—related goods and services, making legitimate reservations or otherwise transacting business with travel suppliers, and for no other purposes. In other words, they disavow any implication that they are also selling you a product. The agreement is with &quot;the customer visiting the Website and/or booking a reservation through us on this Website, or through our customer service agents&quot;, which confirms that they are &quot;facilitating&quot; an arrangement (with a &quot;partner&quot; i.e. the airline). The agreement part comes where they say By accessing or using this Website, booking any reservations for travel products or services, or contacting our call center agents, you agree that the Terms of Use then in force shall apply In case of dispute, there is a section on &quot;working it out informally&quot;, which has the bottom line You and Expedia agree that any and all Claims will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court, except that you and we may assert Claims on an individual basis in small claims court if they qualify. This includes any Claims you assert against us, our subsidiaries, travel suppliers or any companies offering products or services through us (which are beneficiaries of this arbitration agreement). The section &quot;SUPPLIER RULES AND RESTRICTIONS&quot; which starts Additional terms and conditions will apply to your reservation and purchase of travel—related goods and services that you select. Please read these additional terms and conditions carefully. In particular, if you have purchased an airfare, please ensure you read the full terms and conditions of carriage issued by the travel supplier, which can be found on the supplier’s website. You agree to abide by the terms and conditions of purchase imposed by any supplier with whom you elect to deal, including, but not limited to, payment of all amounts when due and compliance with the supplier's rules and restrictions regarding availability and use of fares, products, or services. Airfare is only guaranteed once the purchase has been completed and the tickets have been issued. Airlines and other travel suppliers may change their prices without notice. We reserve the right to cancel your booking if full payment is not received in a timely fashion. I went through the exercise, and it does offer a highly unintelligible stream of text that states the &quot;rules&quot;, though the text is hosted on Expedia and not the carrier's website (this refers not to the contract of carriage, but to the booking-specific contract details that state the flight-specific conditions. The contract of carriage is on the UA webpage). The next paragraph states In case of a no-show or cancellation, you may be entitled to a refund of airport taxes and fees included in the price of the ticket purchased. Where you are eligible for a refund, you can request such a refund from Expedia customer service, who will submit your request to the airline on your behalf. You will note the conditionality of this information. They do promise to submit your request to the airline – that's part of the contract. Your agreement with Expedia is murky, but it appears that you have not agreed to acquire a flight from Expedia in exchange for money, rather, you have agreed to allow Expedia to facilitate your contract with the carrier(s), where there is no clear statement of &quot;consideration&quot; in the agreement, but one may assume that what they get is whatever commission they have negotiated in their contract with the carrier. It is not clear to me that there is such a thing as &quot;Expedia credit&quot;. They refer to airline credit, which is certainly a thing. The first thing they say is &quot;If you’ve had to cancel or change your non-refundable flight, most airlines will offer you a credit instead of a refund&quot;. I can attest that issues do arise when an airline cancels a flight then issues a credit rather than a refund, however that was a foreign carrier who changed their policy after a year. The named airline has a (current) statement of refund policy. Your relation with the airline is ultimately reducible to their contract of carriage. Refunds are covered under Rule 27. In theory, they should therefore issue a refund, but also read Rule 24, where para D says In the event of a Force Majeure Event, UA without notice, may cancel, terminate, divert, postpone, or delay any flight, right of carriage or reservations (whether or not confirmed) and determine if any departure or landing should be made, without any liability on the part of UA. UA may re-accommodate Passengers on another available UA flight or on another carrier or combination of carriers, or via ground transportation, or may refund, in its sole discretion, any unused portions of the Ticket in the form of a travel certificate or travel credit. So it depends on the circumstances.
The ultimate question is whether an obviously joke enterprise constitutes a real offering of securities or just performance art (a Ponzi scheme is one of many types of securities fraud). An unregistered offering of securities that does not fall within an exception is per se unlawful under federal law, but a security is generally defined as something offered with at least a prospect of making a potential profit for the investor which is not something that is true of this offering. (And if less than $1,000,000 are sold it might even be within an exemption to securities laws). State securities laws are divided into two categories. Most allow any offering of securities so long as proper disclosures are made and the offer is restricted to the right kind of investors. A minority impose substantive quality standards on offerings and this offering might violate the law in those states (although this still would present the question of whether a known money losing opportunity is really a security since there is no evidence of an intent to potentially make a profit from the investment). I do not believe that California imposes substantive quality of investment standards on public or private offerings of securities. Any deal whether or not it is a security is actionable if it is fraudulent. Normally an element of any claim for fraud is justified reliance upon a representation or upon a failure to disclose information. But, in this case, it is hard to see how anyone could say that they were justified in relying on any representation in making a purchase because they were told that they were being cheated. So, it is hard to see how a fraud claim would be sustained here either. I'm not sure that this cleanly falls into the category of gambling either, even though there is money at stake and the outcome isn't entirely certain. This doesn't really seem like a game of chance to me. Indeed, viewed as performance art, this scheme might even be entitled to First Amendment protection. Ultimately, I would not prioritize a civil or criminal action against this enterprise either from the perspective of a private lawyer representing an investor, or from the perspective of a government enforcement authority. And, while I would be a little nervous about running this enterprise, I wouldn't be quaking in my boots. In a civil lawsuit, any award would probably be minimal, and in a criminal case there would probably be an extremely generous plea offered.
AA &quot;requests&quot; that you remove batteries from checked laptops and put them in carry-on luggage. You must, per their contract of carriage, &quot;comply with airline safety rules&quot;, and they say that they can deny you boarding if you do not comply, which includes &quot;Are uncooperative, abusive, harassing, or show the potential to be while on board&quot;. You might then hope to sue them because you didn't violate any safety policy of theirs but they denied you your seat, but there's nothing in the contract that states &quot;The following is a complete list of policies&quot;. You should discuss this in more detail with your lawyer, but on the face of it there is no legal recourse, except of course a refund.
In Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski (2021), the US Supreme Court addressed a case that sought one dollar in nominal damages. I'm assuming you mean only claims involving money damages as a remedy, because there are many claims every year involving no literal money damages and the remedy sought is some other kind of relief (although such relief would still have practical or economic value).
Assuming you have suffered a delay, you may complain both to the airline and the national enforcing body with this form. If you don't know your NEB, this will tell you where they are. This document spells out the procedure interaction between your NEB and the airline, specifically addressing the "extraordinary circumstances" question. If information provided by airlines is of a coherent and detailed character, NEB are left with a margin of flexibility and can apply a system of random checks, respecting the principle of proportionality. If information is only provided in a generalised manner not allowing NEB to draw sound judgements, each incident has to be followed up on individual case-by-case assessment requesting for example, as matter of proof, logbooks, incident reports, maintenance manuals etc. The airline may provide the NEB with sufficient evidence that there were "extraordinary circumstances", in which case you're probably not going to get compensation, or they were too vague and the NEB will follow up, and you either get compensation or you won't. If the NEB doesn't rule the way you'd like, you could sue (which is a risk) if you think there was a misinterpretation of the regulation, for example, if the NEB didn't get the message that care is always mandated and only compensation goes away. Or, it may be necessary to sue in order to get an official interpretation (such as what "arrival time" means), but such cases are rare (this seems to contain the applicable case law)/ This only goes to the question of whether the airline interprets the facts in accordance with the law, where the NEB will correct the airline if necessary. There is no cost effective way to test whether the facts reported to the NEB were falsified.
The order itself is here. It applies to &quot;any United States person&quot;, which includes citizens, LPRs, entities with a US basis, and any other person in the US including tourists. It applies to transactions, and not static possession. There is no exception to the effect that &quot;you can trade as long as it's not on the NYSE&quot;, and it says Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited The order is not just directed at brokers, or the NYSE, it applies to everybody / everything everywhere, if you are a US person. Apparently there was some unclarity on the OTC question, which was clarified by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, to the effect that it includes OTC trading.
What you're talking about is a liquidated-damages clause, where the contract explicitly spells out the damages to be awarded in the event of a breach. The law will vary some from state to state, but these clauses are generally enforceable. Some courts limit their use to cases where calculating the damages resulting from the breach would be impossible or impractical. But in the United States, along with all other common law jurisdictions, courts generally agree that if the liquidated-damages clause appears to penalize the breach instead of simply compensating for it, it is not enforceable. See, e.g., Ridgley v. Topa Thrift &amp; Loan Ass'n, 17 Cal.4th 970, 977 (Cal. 1998) (“A liquidated damages clause will generally be considered unreasonable, and hence unenforceable under section 1671(b), if it bears no reasonable relationship to the range of actual damages that the parties could have anticipated would flow from a breach.”) The trillion-dollar damages clause &quot;bears no reasonable relationship&quot; to the damages that would actually result from a breach of a software license, so you can safely expect a court to refuse to enforce it, and limit you to whatever damages you could actually prove in court. Even if you were to drastically reduce it to &quot;all the money you have, and then some,&quot; &quot;all the money you have,&quot; &quot;half the money you have,&quot; or even &quot; &quot;1 percent of all the money you have,&quot; the language still makes clear that the contract is not aimed at compensating for the breach, but rather penalizing the breaching party. In the end, what you're talking about isn't going to work, because contract law is generally less concerned with penalizing people than with making them whole.