US law firm AbingtonIP has put a form on their website asking the general populace for details on their particular situations if they themselves have found their consoles banned from Live, as well as whether they've received a prorated refund from Microsoft for the amount of months of Gold account service that had been purchased.

Of course, anyone who's paused during one those easily-clickable End User License Agreements has probably seen plenty of harsh language about how Microsoft is well within their rights to ban your account, stop giving you service, negate your marriage rights, and kick your dog--all at any time and without warning. This is, one would think, one of those sad facts of living in a world of corporations and legalese: going against The Man will mean they can have their way with you, because they have lawyers and you don't.

Which is exactly why it's interesting that AbingtonIP seems to be taking the first steps to enact a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for just such an attitude. From their perspective, Microsoft basically stole customers' money to the tune of between $8 and $50 for every single Gold account that was banned. Even if it wasn't a million accounts stacking up, that's still a whole lot of paid time for which MS happily received the money and then cut the cord. Part of the lawsuit may also point out the facts that Microsoft essentially waited until around the time the biggest multiplayer games were releasing, thus ensuring more bannable accounts were racking up paid time in Gold status, before banning them en-masse without a refund; and the little detail that, unless there's some sort of disc-imprinting technology MS has perfected, it's actually impossible to prove that someone with a modded console was truly using it to violate copyright and thus deprive anyone of their licensing fees.

Again, while it's definitely easy to laugh and say, 'you done messed up' to anyone who somehow thought it was a good idea to take a modded system online, the details involved do point to some maneuvering on Microsoft's part that may be violating the good faith of those who still paid for their online service. And it's not entirely test in our legal system whether EULAs are necessarily binding agreements - generally, they are, but if a court thinks there's enough unreasonable or greedy action on the part of the license holder, the contract suddenly gets a lot less powerful.

Or, to put it differently: just because someone big puts in writing that all grass in now lavender doesn't mean it's true. Nor does it mean they won't still hold a candlelight vigil and a tribunal to ensure the voices of proudly-green grass are still heard.

In any case, class-action lawsuits tend to take years to get rolling, which means the next time we hear progress on whether the modders and the lawyers who love them actually have a case to present will be around the same time the PlayBox 4 comes out.