Collectors refiles to end the antitrust case. Beckett's own terms are still offline.

The hearing that was supposed to settle the first round did not happen, because the first round no longer exists. In early August the court let Michael Rasmussen amend his complaint. The amended version, filed on 10 August, adds two more collectors as plaintiffs, Erick Azarian of California and Andrew Fedynyshyn of Pennsylvania, with new claims and new allegations about SGC after the acquisition. An amended complaint replaces the one before it, so Collectors' June motions were aimed at a document that had been superseded. The court set 21 September as the deadline for fresh motions and moved the hearing to 11 December.

Collectors met the deadline to the day with a new motion to dismiss and a new motion to compel arbitration, and the list of who is asking has changed. In June only the parent, Collectors Holdings, signed. This time PSA, New SGC, Beckett Collectibles and, on the arbitration motion, Beckett Grading Services sign too. Every grading brand in the roll-up is now formally asking a judge either to end the case or to send it to private arbitration.

Arbitration is the part that matters most outside the courtroom. As reported in June, Collectors' first motion argued that Rasmussen had agreed to arbitrate under the Collectors user agreement and had not used a 30-day window to opt out. The new filings cannot be read without a PACER account, so whether that argument has changed is not known. If it succeeds, the market-power question is decided privately, if it is decided at all.

That puts Beckett in an awkward position. It is one of the companies asking the court to hold customers to their agreements, and its own agreements are not on the internet. Since 9 September, beckett.com/terms, /terms-of-use, /privacy and /privacy-policy have all redirected to a maintenance page served out of Amazon S3. They still did when we checked on 23 September, as did the certificate lookup. status.beckett.com, where a company would post a restoration date, does not resolve at all.

The only Beckett terms a customer can read right now are the ones pasted into the JotForm it has used to take submissions since 15 September. We read the full text of that form on 23 September. It contains no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver, and it does not mention Collectors. The one dispute provision we found points the other way: a waiver of jury trial, and an agreement that any action goes to the state or federal courts in Collin County, Texas.

That does not show the motion is wrong. Beckett may be relying on terms customers accepted on beckett.com before the outage, or on the Collectors user agreement, and the filing is not public. Nor is it known whether any of the three plaintiffs ever sent Beckett a card. What it does show is narrower and more practical: a collector who wants to know today how a dispute with Beckett would be resolved cannot find out from Beckett. The pages that would say are down, and the form that is up names courts, not arbitration.

The outage is also worth holding against the complaint itself. The amended complaint's theory, filed a month before Beckett went dark, is that Collectors can raise prices and let service slip at the brands it bought without losing the business. A top-four grader running for two weeks with no certificate lookup, no population report, no published terms and intake on rented forms is not in the complaint, because it had not happened yet. Whether either side raises it in December is for the lawyers.

For anyone spending money, the practical point is timing. Nothing will be decided before 11 December, and a hearing is not a ruling; judges often take motions under submission. Slabs already graded are unaffected either way. Anyone submitting to Beckett in the meantime should read the terms on the form as the only terms on offer, because they are the only ones anyone can see.