A solar eclipse in Columbia, South Carolina.

A pair of Amazon.com customers should be barred from bringing a class action over allegedly defective solar eclipse glasses that were purchased online last year, the e-commerce company told a judge Monday in South Carolina federal district court.

Lawyers for Amazon, represented by Greenville, South Carolina-based Gallivan, White & Boyd, contend the consumers' claims must go to arbitration and that, additionally, the company is immune from liability under the federal Communications Decency Act, a law that can shield websites from liability over content posted by third parties.

Amazon has said it did not manufacture the glasses at issue in the case, which were sold by a third party on the company's site. The company offered refunds to consumers who purchased certain glasses to watch the eclipse.

In August, about a week after a solar eclipse captivated the nation, five law firms teamed up against Amazon to allege that the online retailer negligently advertised and distributed hazardous safety glasses and then failed to adequately alert customers about product defects.

Amazon had emailed consumers with warnings not to use certain products to view the eclipse, but in a lawsuit filed in Charleston, South Carolina, federal court, lawyers said the recall effort was “tragically too little, too late” and never reached the lead plaintiffs—Corey Payne and Kayla Harris.

The plaintiffs claimed that, after viewing the eclipse with the glasses they had purchased on Amazon, they “began to see dark spots in their line of vision, suffered vision impairment, including blurriness, a central blind spot, increased sensitivity, changes in perception of color and distorted vision.”

Amazon's lawyers said Monday that the arbitration clause and class-action waiver in the company's “conditions of use” should force Payne and Harris to resolve their dispute out of court.

“The plaintiffs propose to represent an expansive and generic class of people who 'purchased or used Unsafe Eclipse Glasses from Amazon.com for viewing of the August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse,'” Amazon's lawyers wrote in their court filing. “All of plaintiffs' claims, however, are governed by Amazon's Conditions of Use and its broad arbitration clause, which require individual arbitration of any and all disputes or claims against Amazon.”

Amazon had previously moved to compel arbitration in the case. In response, Amazon said, Payne and Harris amended their complaint “in what appears to be a futile effort to circumvent the mandatory arbitration agreement by dividing the proposed class into purchaser and non-purchaser subclasses.”

“This strategy, however, fails because only the plaintiffs' claims are at issue at this juncture, and all of the named plaintiffs' claims are subject to arbitration pursuant to the Federal Arbitration Act,” Amazon's lawyers argued.

Propping up Amazon's argument, the defense lawyers said, was a 2011 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the justices ruled that class action waivers in arbitration agreements are enforceable. Since that decision, in AT&T v. Concepcion, arbitration agreements have proliferated in the fine print of companies' terms of use.

“The proposed plaintiffs cannot avoid the arbitration agreement on the grounds that they would prefer to pursue class action claims,” Amazon's lawyers said Monday. “The arbitration agreement expressly provides that '[w]e each agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class, consolidated or representative action.'”

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