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Sony Sued Over PSN 'No Suing' Provision
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Examiner:
"In a grand dose of irony today, Sony was sued over a term in the PlayStation Network's End User Agreement that states that users cannot sue Sony. These terms were added in September, after a long string of Sony hacks (the official count is that Sony got broken into 17 times in a space of about 2 months), which included a massive outage of the PlayStation Network itself. The suit that was filed today is a class action suit for all of those who bought a PS3 and signed up for the PSN before the September update to the EULA. The suit also claims that this is a unfair Business practice on Sony's part, and requires users to forgo their rights in order to use the device that they purchased."
In this specific case Sony also allowed you to opt-out from that specific provision and still accept the rest and use PSN, you only had to give them written notice about it. So if you want to bash Sony, it would be good to at least stay in truth.
PSN is required to use Netflix, So, yes, it is required to 'use' the PS3.
I don't game, and didn't buy the ps3 to game. I bought it to act as a media viewer. Not being able to watch netflix on my bigscreen is a huge problem. I had to agree to the new TOS or the netflx app wouldn't connect.
I'd sign onto this class action, you bet.
I'll never buy a sony product again.
jaz
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
I can't speak for the rest of the world but here in Australia it is illegal to infer in a contract that a consumers "legislated" rights have been waved, from memory it's $10,000 per infringement.
I agree it's an unfair act to strangle customers with new provisions to older purchases. I don't believe I have a working system that could log onto PSN currently to accept those provisions but I'm considering sending an opt-out to Sony's legal department just in case because I have a lot of older digital purchases from the Playstation Network dating from 2006-2009. If a lawsuit does happen over the EULA and it works in the favor of people that are entitled to class action ability (or even the ability to launch a lawsuit on my own), I want to be a part of it.
You can't get a refund for anything on the Playstation Network. Trust me, I tried. After SCEA turned the keys over to SNEA (or whatever abbreviation Sony's using for their digital networking division) and the hacking that bought PSN down for a month, I wrote a letter to Sony explaining that I've lost faith in their digital service and their ability to secure vital financial and personal information and could no longer A) Be their customer B) Agree to their new terms because it's not the service I signed up for in November of 2006 (and it might have never been with the way EULAs are crafted). I can either have to forfeit your ability to log in or accept the new terms.
EULAs have become this living contract that only favors the company and totally, unconditionally screws the customer. Period. Sony is a case example of excessive abuse of EULAs because of their management and business shortcomings and have a total disconnect with their customers.
The Supremes already ruled on this, and unsuprisingly we got a 5-4 ruling that corporations are better than people. Until the conservative stranglehold on the SCOTUS is broken, Americans won't be allowed to sue any company they've entered into a contract with. Now, maybe EULAs don't count for this. But given the court's corporatist bent, I wouldn't count on it.
That's too bad, Sony makes some great products. So tell me, what bastion of perfection do you buy your goods from?
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So how is a 12 year old held to contract law?