Apple Faces Class-Action Suit For In-App Purchases

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Garen Meguerian and a team of lawyers are taking Apple to task for 'inducing' children to spend hundreds of dollars of their parents' money on in-app game purchases. Meguerian filed a class-action lawsuit this week in California, acknowledging that Apple has already addressed the problem, but saying that the company continues to unfairly profit from sales of virtual 'smurfberries' and 'fish bucks.' The issue at hand is related to games that rely on a 'freemium' business model, giving away the game for free on the App Store and relying on in-app purchases of virtual currency, extra levels, or other add-ons as a revenue stream."

Comments

Re:Easy Way Out

[cptdondo]

OTOH I've had my kids' phones "virused" with pay-per-month crap... The invitation is sent as a text, and it's the typical "Hey check this out!" and all the kid has to do is reply. Bang! $10/month for ever for a monthly fortune. I don't know what stuff Apple was pulling, but certainly the texts my kids got were deceiving and not clear. And T-Mobile was complicit in allowing these operators to continue, no doubt getting a big slice of the action. I asked my daughter if she ever subscribed intentionally; she didn't even know she had subscribed. And T-Mobile admitted when I bitched about it that the come-on was often deceptive.

Apple is the responsible party

[Animats]

From the complaint: "The sale of an App and/or Game Currency is a transaction between Apple and the consumer. There is no privity between the user and the developer of the App...."

They're so right. Remember how Apple won't approve apps which do transactions that don't go through Apple? This is where that bites Apple. Apple is the seller, and the developers are its suppliers. There's no contractual relationship between the consumer and the developer. ("Privity" refers to the legal concept that if A has a contract with B, and B has a contract with C, A does not have a contract with C.)

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Re:Bad parenting

[MightyMartian]

An obvious problem with all these "stupid parent posts" is that these kids in most jurisdictions can't enter contracts without the consent of their parents or guardians, so I'm curious as to why everyone is saying "stupid parent", when they should be saying "stupid Apple lawyers".

I fail to see that Apple REQUIRES a CC

[pushing-robot]

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534