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Class Action Suit Goodies Await Tech Users
jfruh writes "Did you buy an Acer laptop with Vista and less than 1 GB of RAM? The company has a thumb drive it would like to send you. Did you get an unwanted text from Papa John's? The company would like to make it up with you with $50 worth of free pizza. These and other little rewards are available as a result of class action lawsuits that have wound their ways through the court systems and now, years later, are paying off for very large groups of tech users." I wonder how many USB drives the lawyers took as their share.
It sounds more like these settlements are paying off for the defendants. Papa John's pulled off an especially neat trick there, getting the court to accept pizza the customers don't want in lieu of statutory damages.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
These aren't the results of judgments, they're the rewards for settlements. So if you ever wondered why the end result is so awful it's because the actual money goes to the lawyers while the people for which the lawsuit was intended to provide justice get cheap plastic kazoos. This is supposed to be okay, though, because "class action lawsuits are intended to punish companies, not restore damages." The best part is that by accepting your cheap plastic kazoo you're also signing away any other legal recourse you may have had.
I was a bit confused since I was certain the minimum requirement was 512mb. Did some research and figured it out:
They pretty much never lead to anything but a payday for lawyers, and an almost insulting token gift (if even that) for the plaintiffs. At least the Apple one sounds good for those who were denied, but how many people still have texts from that long ago to prove Papa John's sent you a text?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Of course it will because margins aren't at all tight in the laptop market.
If you purchased an eMachines computer with a floppy drive way back in the late 90s, you can get either $62.50 in cash, or $365 worth of Gateway or Acer stuff from their refurb outlet.
http://www.emachinesfloppydisksettlement.com/CaseInfo.aspx?pas=EMS
I'd forgotten I ever bought an eMachine until I got the notice last month.
The point of a class action lawsuit isn't, unfortunately, to compensate the members of the class. The point of a class action lawsuit is that there are too many people who suffered minor damages to really be able to logistically handle that.
The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers. And before you go spouting off about how ultimately they pass that cost on to customers, maybe they do, but if so, that puts them at a disadvantage compared to other companies. Or put another way, if Domino's is giving their customers good quality pizza while Papa John's is skimping because they are trying to pass a $2 billion lawsuit judgment on to their customers, they'll lose market share. But I digress...
Anyway, I don't necessarily agree that the lawyers should make so much off of a class action lawsuit, although they really should make a lot, since they're handling the details of compensation which costs a lot more than most people think. What I'd like to see is some kind of public fund set up for money like this to go into, such as to build parks or something, so that the end effect of punishing the companies is maintained but the incredible amount of time, effort, and money that goes towards mailing a few people checks for a buck or two isn't wasted. At least that way, you also avoid the problem that class action payouts usually aren't that high since most eligible claimants won't bother to jump through the hoops to get their judgment.
The sad truth of it is that the poor lawyers probably did not get any thumb drives at all and had to make due with nothing more than millions of dollars for their trouble.
But flour is expensive. It's been replaced with finely ground sand.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'll trade those poor folks some thumb drives. I'm a nice person.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
why is the "tl;dr" part of your post longer than the part that is supposedly too long to read?
They did
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/06/0140252/verizon-ordered-to-provide-all-customer-data-to-nsa
Several hours ago. That's when:
Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSA
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday June 06, 2013 @12:27AM
from the do-you-hear-what-I-hear dept.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/06/0140252/verizon-ordered-to-provide-all-customer-data-to-nsa
When is SlashDot going to post the Verizon story?
I know a lot of us have heard or seen the "NSA box" in our closets, but now it's official:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
Off-topic, I know, but this one is boring. (Everyone already knows class action suits screw consumers.)
You must have been asleep and missed it. This was the first story posted today, 27 minutes after midnight:
Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSA
Posted by samzenpus on 12:27 AM June 6th, 2013
Go to the front page and scroll down a bit, difficult as that apparently is. You should see the story you were hoping for.
Which is a feature not a bug.
They did the work, and they took the risk. They also made it possible for a company to be punished without requiring people to spend a day at a courthouse for a minor damage. If class actions were not available then any company could rip off its customers so long as it kept that theft below the amount that would motivate most folks to go to court.
Product paid for by future cuts = free product now and none of my business later when the company cuts quality or raises prices to compensate.
A free pizza from Papa Johns today that will result in higher prices tomorrow means I buy Little Caesars tomorrow.
A "windfall" ACER USB drive in my hand today that raises Acer prices across means I buy a Dell PC instead.
It's called the free market. You're free to charge whatever you want, and I'm free to buy from someone else.
Class Actions are like unions. They serve a purpose, keeping the corporate bosses honest, but have grown wildly out of control and benefit the people that run them much more than the people they represent.
If the penalty is reflected in the price of next year's line of Acer laptops, then more people will buy from Toshiba instead. "Passing it on to the consumers" only works when the entire market is passing it on, not just one company.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I agree on the first point and disagree on the second. Like unions they are fast becoming nerfed to the point of uselessness. Class actions and unions benefit all of society and are being castrated by the corporations to ensure they are no longer a hindrance. Your idea that they have grown when they shrank like unions is like the effect of the media you consume. I urge you to turn to actual statistics instead.
Pretty much all one sided contracts, like cell phones now include verbiage forbidding class action suits.
Or, in case of Acer, it could enable them to move product that wasn't moving (say the Thumb drive was at a very low density that nobody wanted). In case of Papa Johns, they get to show all those extra pizzas as product that had to be made and delivered to customers, if not technically sales.
Acers free thumb drive will be factored into 1q2014 quarterly profit and expenditures accordingly. it will be reflected in the price of the $next_Acer_laptop
So not only do they get a free thumbdrive, but competitors laptops will be cheaper for the same thing since the cost of those drives has been added to acers new units, which I wasn't planning on purchasing anyway having been burned by them last time?
So... how is that not a win for me?
tl;dr: at no point does your class action windfall guarantee companies wont try to fuck you in the future in pursuit of the same greed that landed them in court the first time
Of course.
its most ethical to not participate in class action skull duggery and simply act as a responsible consumer.
It makes even more sense to take your class action freebie, and then refuse to do business with them in the future.
When? They published it over eight hours ago, Swifty.
FWIW, to give him credit, he was quoted out of context over his supposed "attack" on HCR, which did include positive commentary on, for example, the fact it leveled the playing field and meant he could provide insurance to his employees without that giving his competitors an advantage over his company.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... he might suddenly decide to decrease the size of a pizza, or the amount of topping, or the quality, or both.
You can reduce the quality of Papa Johns pizzas?
"I won a class action lawsuit against Acer and all I got was this stupid flash drive."
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
But in order to get any of this you'll need to provide us with extensive information which will be used for marketing purposes, and sign away some other rights.
Most importantly, these 'settlements' amount to trivial amounts, and no real admission of guilt ... gee, a whole 16GB USB stick for selling a laptop which is patently not suited for the claimed purposes, several years later when you can buy one at a gas station for $10. That makes up for selling a shitty product in the first place.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Acer settlement (and all the others mentioned here, if I had to guess) is for US residents only. It's too bad this couldn't have been mentioned in the summary, the linked article, or even the front page for the settlement.
Are the /. editors yet unaware that the majority of its readership lives outside the US?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Papa John's pizza needs to be hit with another class-action lawsuit. I've witnessed something quite illegal - here in California, delivery drivers have $1 taken off of every credit card-paid delivery they make where the tip received is over $1.95. That's a violation of California Labor Code 351.
Might as well keep suing ol Schnatter until he's out of business permanently.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Papa John's stop free pizza and give healthcare to your workers. Any ways the big 3 all suck. Lot's of good small chains in the Chicago area.
The first class action I got involved in was pretty decent. A replacement CD-writer for one that died early. The replacement wasn't SCSI like the original but fair enough. I'd bought the original one used anyway.
The last couple that have come in my mailbox though were just stupid. For trivial things that were nobody's fault and were just a waste of time and resources to take through the courts. They went straight in the trash.
What I would like to see a class action for is the broken GPS on the Galaxy S that I carried for 3 years. Total rip-off and Samsung stonewalled anyone trying to find out what the issue was.
> Did you buy an Acer laptop with Vista and less than 1 GB of RAM?
Um, no, because I'm not an idiot.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I received an email a week ago about a settlement on optical drives. Apparently it is about drive manufactures colluding to keep the disc drive prices artificially high. The email was sparse on details of the settlement and did not have details on claim amounts or how to redeem yet.
The question I had was how they determine the amount. The settlement includes PC component drives and consumer electronics devices that have drives built into them. As someone who has built a personal computer and purchased two blu-ray players in the specified period I would think I'm entitled to three times the settlement amount.
Nintendo did this a long time ago. Instead of paying money, Nintendo passed out "coupons" for games. So this is nothing new.
I think it's about time you sat down and had a talk to your brother about his thieving ways.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
"Passing it on to the consumers" only works when the entire market is passing it on, not just one company.
I think tobacco companies might disagree.
They're affected by competition like everything else, though in their case they're granted an enforced oligopoly on the market (your government at work - I do not believe it is legal to start a new tobacco company). Most of the costs that they've had to pass on though were industry-wide ones like the big tobacco lawsuits - so the entire market was passing it on.