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Sony Sued Over PS3 "Other OS" Removal
Stoobalou writes "A Californian Playstation 3 user has filed the first class action lawsuit against Sony over removal of the 'Install Other OS' function from the Playstation 3. The action seeks to redress Sony's 'intentional disablement of the valuable functionalities originally advertised as available with the Sony Playstation 3 video game console.' The suit claims that the disablement breaches the sales contract between Sony and its customers and constitutes 'an unfair and deceptive business practice perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting customers.'"
A prediction: there will be some settlement, where the "victims" can claim $10 in coupons for discounted games, but the lawyers will make a few hundred thousand or a million.
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It's also possible Sony will make every attempt to settle this out of court to prevent the court from definitively ruling on what a company may and may not put in a ToS/EULA. If a court ruled that when you buy hardware that REQUIRES software to run then you are buying the software as well there are going to be a lot of angry companies (E.G. Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, etc...) out there whom will lose their easy way to shaft their customers.
Human body update 568.3... since you have the potential to put non-edible things in your mouth we are disabling eating so that you may continue to breath our air service, you may chose to deny this update and continue eating but we will no longer allow you access to air... We're not forcing you to stop eating.. the choice is entirely yours. Have a nice day.
Collector's Edition
Class Action lawsuits in this country are near pointless in terms of causing redress, and barely hurt the companies they're brought against. In a lot of bigger companies they're seen as a regular cost of business.
As said in other posts, enjoy your coupon that ends up making you spend more money.
If you REALLY wanted to get redress, take sony to small claims court.
$50-100 filing fee(75 in my state), you can get damages up to $5000, and you can make sony pay the court fee upon winning too.
They'll either start settling cases, or waste a lot more sending representation to win.
So sue em for the cost a new PS3, since that's what it will take to restore you the original functionality that they took away ( one PS3 to play games and do PSN, one to run linux, since you can't do it on both anymore).
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Sony's standard EULA states that if the machine
1) didn't work,
2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said,
3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood,
4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it,
This was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer,
5) that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, /cite{Good Omens}
6) that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
They just added
7) If the machine does work, we will break it the next time we want your money or feel like it.
P.S.
>>>they can't "restore the Other OS function" any better than you can. What lesson are you trying to teach them?
(1) Obey the law even if you don't like it. (2) If enough merchants like Walmart, Kmart, Sears, et cetera lose money due to refunds on Sony's products, then THEY will sue Sony for damages causes to their businesses. And they have far more power than we do to make Sony hurt.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You say that as if its a bad thing...I would bet that the majority of gamers would rather have a less expensive console purely for gaming than the expensive swiss army knife consoles we have today....why do you think the Wii is absolutely crushing the PS3 and 360.
I think you're all missing the point. The path the GP poster made was not necessarily to Best buy or whoever but to Sony. There's two scenarios:
1) You call the 1-800 Sony line and get Prakesh on the other line. For all you know he sympothizes with you but is powerless to do anything. He can't give you back Other OS, he can maybe apologize and bring it to management who proceeds to ROFL (yes, on the floor) and then scrap your complaint.
2) You take your purchase back to Best Buy: under law they are forced to return your price and then duke it out against Sony about the return charge.
Who do you think Sony listens to? Joe, who is upset with their firmware on the line, or Best Buy USA whose upper management is yelling at you because they got a surplus of PS3s that they've been forced to refund because of your shit decision?
I don't think you realize exactly what Sony did here. Back when they were fighting the war against HD-DVD, they loved these Linux sales. Every user who bought a PS3 for reasons besides playing games was listed on the headcount of active Bluray players, and therefore served their master plan to kill off their competitor though showing superior market share.
Now that said competitor is gone, they'd prefer not to sell to or support those users, and so they're just killing them off. Sony has finished with using them now and now is actively fucking them over. All of us who leaned toward buying a PS3 due the Linux feature have been intentionally played here.