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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.'"
You should also file a complaint at your own national consumer agency. I asked the store I bought my PS3 from to restore the Other OS function or offer a refund on the product because the ability was stated in the box. In this case the seller is breaking the law if such stated features are later removed.
They initially refused to offer a refund, so I filed a complaint to the consumer agency. It's important you try to talk with the seller first, and if both parties don't come into a good conclusion, then file a report. They contacted the seller, who then again contacted me and asked me to return the PS3 and they would give me a full refund.
I'm sure stores will first try to say that they cannot offer a refund and it's up to Sony, but if law states they are liable, just take it a bit further and you will get a refund. It will teach Sony a lesson too.
That's what an EU citizen did. It came out of amazon's pocket if I recall correctly, and I'm sure they then charged it back to Sony.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I suppose this might an opportunity to test those "We reserve the right to change the EULA" and the EULAs themselves in court.
here:
http://ia331218.us.archive.org/2/items/gov.uscourts.cand.226894/gov.uscourts.cand.226894.1.0.pdf
(1) How do people join?
(2) If I bought the unit used for the ability to play PS2 games and OtherOS, do I qualify? It was bought within the time specified....
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
My bet is he will lose. Sony will find some loophole, the judge will allow it because the removal of this function affects a very small part of the userbase.
Car analogy time. My car comes with a spare tyre in the boot (trunk for you Yanks). Now most people will never have to use this. Most people are lucky enough to buy, use and then sell a car without ever having a flat or blowout. Now, if the car manufacturer decides during a scheduled service that they're going to remove the tyre from my boot (and the boots of everyone else that comes in for a service) then it will only affect a small part of their userbase, but it doesn't matter. The car was sold and marketed as having a spare tyre, and they can't just take that away.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Sony reminds me of Vader from this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOaCRGVYGTc
And if I weren't laughing, I'd be crying at the stupid shit Sony is trying to force the consumers into.
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.
When have Microsoft, Apple or Nintendo ever shafted their customers by listing a feature on the box that didn't exist in the actual product?
Unless it's like Brazil where the law states you have to have a spare tire at all times.
And God forbid you try driving around without one - it comes with a nice ticket for you to pay.
http://stoploudness.org/
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
I'm not a fan of class action lawsuits because they usually result in pennies for the consumer and millions for the attorneys. They're basically lawyer-enrichment actions.
For this suit to be any different, the best outcome would be to give Sony an option.
Give the attorneys a few million for their time whichever choice Sony takes and the outcome will serve as a warning to companies that they can't put whatever they wish into EULAs because consumers will bite back.
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...
Er, of course a contract can take your rights away. As long as doing so is not an illegal act.
It is routine to contract away legal remedies, for example. (E.g., all disputes will be handled by third party arbitration, or "damages are limited to replacement only.") Or to specify venue to someplace that favors the defendant.
While it is unusual, there are probably remote legal circumstances where "you must give us your children" might hold up.
Well hello there Mr. Obnoxious American. Now, as you may or (more likely) may not be aware, the English language was invented right here in little old Britain. We spell it tyre. You're entitled to mispell it as tire if you like, but every time you do we Brits have a quiet chuckle to ourselves, roll our eyes at our backwards cousins across the Pond and carry on in our usual dignified manner.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
That's because you won't see any such citations. The whole "EULAs are unenforceable" is a false meme that constantly repeated on Slashdot. It's the same as the people who will talk about how ISPs are "common carriers" yet no such actual status for ISPs exist. The problem is that since these falsities have been repeated so many times that most Slashtards take them as fact.
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.
No, tire is what happens when Brits are repeated subjected to Americans trying to correct British spelling into the peculiar bastardized American dialect. The poster even made it clear he was British, so there's no point criticising his correct spelling. And yes, before you get uppity, "criticising" can be spelt with an s. And yes, spelt is correct too.
This law suite should fail. Not that I want to be on SONY's side but they were 100% clear in their intentions regarding the "other os" option from day one.
You mean stating that the PS3 was an "open platform" and that "Other OS" and "Game OS" would always be able to coexist on the same PS3?
They're even still publicising this fact here...
Then you've lost the use of the PSN and anything that requires it.
Either way, you've lost a serious amount of functionality that was claimed on the box. If you don't install, the functionality happens to be "play games"
Just because someone tells you they're making a dick move doesn't mean they're no longer making a dick move.
But "repeated subjected" is not. ;-)
I want to shoot the messenger!
Bullshit. You buy a PS3 and then a couple years later they tell you 'ok, now you have to choose between feature A not working and feature B not working'. If Sony is allowed to do this, then that also means it would be legal for them to start charging money for the features that the game consale originally came with and advertised as being free. Why don't they just make the next firmware update required a $50 payment every time you want to eject the current game disk? I mean as long as they let you know that's what it's doing before installing, there's nothing wrong with that, right?
You can't sell something that doesn't do what it's advertised as doing. And you can't sell something that's going to stop functioning at some future date without making that clear at the time of purchase.
You're acting like a Tyre-ant.
Ladies and gentlemen, May I present to you a prime example of Motron's Fork
The choice is slightly different, though. Here we have "Lose Other OS functionality" or "Lose ability to use PSN and play any new games which require the firmware upgrade (you can bet that they all do)."
Regarding the modded down comment above about "hyperbole inherent in the freetard system" (nice butchery of Monty Python, cockfungus) My PC runs Linux, I game using WINE. A happy freetard is me!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Well hello there Mr. Obnoxious American. Now, as you may or (more likely) may not be aware, the English language was invented right here in little old Britain. We spell it tyre. You're entitled to mispell it as tire if you like, but every time you do we Brits have a quiet chuckle to ourselves, roll our eyes at our backwards cousins across the Pond and carry on in our usual dignified manner.
I like to think of myself as a typical obnoxious American, and I found your post quiet amusing. Really put some color into my day.
^Citation needed...^
Bite my shiny metal ass!
I have the 60 GB model from Jan of 2008 and it is in my manual. This was a very widely publicized feature and it was the deal breaker for me. I was going to buy a Wii, but paid the extra $300 for the PS3 because of Linux. If you read the Lawsuit PDF it gives very concrete examples of how and when Sony and it's executives promoted about this feature. Balls in your court dumb-ass
Yes (slightly outdated).
Yes, and piracy advocates will come out with a piracy tool shortly after it is completely broken.
Yes, Sony is shooting itself in the foot bigtime.
I see what you did there. I admire your sense of humour.
All of the people who are bitching about the removal of the "Other OS" feature and how much they hate Sony now will be lined up to buy the PS4.
Just don't buy a PS3, and don't buy Sony.
The message is simple. After the root kit and this, it is clear. Sony expects you to pay them money while they slap you in the face, saying F U.
Hello there, you silly English ka-niggot.
tire
late 15c., "iron rim of a carriage wheel," probably from tire "equipment, dress, covering" (c.1300), an aphetic form of attire. The notion is of the tire as the dressing of the wheel. The original spelling was tyre, which had shifted to tire in 17c.-18c., but since early 19c. tyre has been revived in Great Britain and become standard there. Rubber ones, for bicycles (later automobiles) are from 1870s.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
So, in 17c-18c, when the Brits were populating America, the spelling was "Tire". We can't help it if you people decided to change your minds. We didn't.
Consumer laws do now work like that.
If things are advertised as being able to do things, they better be able to do them, including all required steps.
You can't sell someone a car labeled as having air conditioning but without any actual switches to turn it on.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Didn't Sony get a tax break in Europe because they were able to claim that the PS3 was a computer because of the Other OS functionality? The tax rate on a console was higher than a computer.
http://kotaku.com/179245/why-the-ps3-is-a-computer-sony-dodges-euro-tax-men