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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."
No EULA is required to use free software. DISTRIBUTING software is a different matter. It's an important difference.
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.
A EULA, like any other contract, is only enforceable if it's provisions don't break the law. A company can put whatever they want into them, but that doesn't mean it has legal standing. Companies don't get to arbitrarily make laws. They could add a provision that you'll give them your first born son, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't stand if challenged in court.
A EULA, like any other contract, is only enforceable if it's provisions don't break the law. A company can put whatever they want into them, but that doesn't mean it has legal standing. Companies don't get to arbitrarily make laws. They could add a provision that you'll give them your first born son, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't stand if challenged in court.
You clearly don't live in the USA.
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.
And, IIRC, didn't the Supreme Court recently rule that an AT&T provision in their contracts did not violate the law? If you are an AT&T customer, your lack of right to sue them (for any reason, no less) has apparently been upheld by the courts. Your sole method of redress is binding arbitration with, as I recall, some sort of liability cap.
What's the good, compelling reason that anyone is allowed to forfeit (or demand another party forfeit) what is otherwise a legal right? What was the justification given for considering this a legitimate part of contract law? Especially in one-sided, non-negotiable contracts of adhesion?
If there are any lawyers who can answer that, I'd really like to know. It seems like one of those incredibly short-sighted ideas that does more harm than good.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If this EULA update worries you, then just give them a written notice that you don't accept that clause. They allow it as long as you notice Sony, and they still let you accept rest of the EULA and use PSN. It's even written there right next to the clause. Read it.
Marketer says: if my decision to automatically sign you up for our endless reams of junk mail err I mean special promotions, adding your name to every advertising database we maintain, and spamming you err I mean keeping you posted about interesting new offers worries you, just waste your time by opting-out of them!
... well, that's where we would disagree. If we are going to have that sort of free-for-all marketplace then I also want all warning labels removed from all products, all drugs to be legal and unrestricted (you still go to a doctor because it's a good idea, if you are too stupid to realize that then you take your chances), all other victimless-crime laws to be repealed, and all scams to be legal since the targets should have known better anyway.
This is a little like mail-in rebates. The company is counting on the fact that most people are lazy, are not diligent, and won't follow through. The number of customers who would say they dislike this clause if asked directly is far higher than the number who actually read through the EULA of their own initiative and used their limited time to follow up on each provision they disliked. Sony knows this.
If you think a business practice that depends solely on laziness and lack of due diligence is perfectly legitimate and deserves to be successful
In some ways, I would like that because laziness and stupidity would become much, much more painful to the point of become rarities. People would learn that no one cares about their own interests more than they do. They'd also learn how to perform basic research when in doubt about something important. However, I'm not really so sure that replacing lazy, fat, stupid people with smart, fit, evil assholes would be an improvement. At any rate, some time ago we decided that "consumer" protection was a good idea and shady business practices don't deserve to be rewarded. All I'm asking for is a little consistency.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're on such a shill roll, I hate to interrupt your flow, but you do realize that Sony marketed the PS3 as a media box, don't you?
And you do realize that they advertised it as a media box on which you could install an "OtherOS", right?
Then, after you shelled out your cash and bought their product, they decide that "Well, no, we really didn't mean that, so we're going to take those capabilities away from you even though you paid for them".
It would be like a a car company saying, after you bought that car, that no, you can no longer put groceries in the trunk because someone might put contraband in their trunk so they're going to remotely lock all trunks so they cannot be used. No, you didn't buy the car just to use it as storage, you bought it as transportation, but the manufacturer just took away a very useful feature of a product. A feature for which they gladly took your money when you bought the product.
"InsightIn140Bytes", I'm trying to figure out why, in the nearly 300 comments you've posted on Slashdot in the three weeks since you signed up for an account here, that so many of them are posts fiercely defending Sony (at least when you're not fiercely defending Microsoft). I'm curious, is it because you just can't stand the injustice of people picking on poor, weak corporations who only want to give their customers great products and make them happy, or is it because you work for one of the "New Media Strategies" type companies and defending these corporations is your job? Because honestly, I can't wrap my head around anyone suggesting that Sony has been anything but hostile to their customers, using the worst kind of bullying and sleazy legal maneuvers (like a 30 day period for sending a written, notarized opt-out via certified mail or else you are considered to have accepted their brand new EULA for a product you may have paid for years ago, or else you won't be able to use many of its features and fuck you if you don't like it).
So tell us, please: What's your story?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not to mention it seems like my PS3 every other time I turn it on wants to either update its OS or update the game I'm currently running before letting me use it. It is like the Windows box from hell (KB 1010283 ready to install don't do anything and don't shut me off while I spin for 20min installing another .00.01 release of a feature you don't use). It isn't just a matter of reading the EULA, I think I did when I opened my box. It is the biweekly OS updates since this problem, each with an EULA warning, which may are may not be different from the original one (and if it is the same is a complete waste of time to read again) but which I'm not willing to spend the 20 minutes I was planning on spending playing a game reading it instead. I'm not sure couldn't they just have sort of a release note? Ie. "all previous rights and terms as before except ... you can't sue us". Would save a heck of a lot of reading/might actually get read/might actually fit on one screen.
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.
You obviously didn't read it carefully, as if you send this in, your PSN account is immediately closed and you forfeit any money you have in your PSN wallet.