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FTC Warns Manufacturers That 'Warranty Void If Removed' Stickers Break the Law (vice.com)
schwit1 writes: The Federal Trade Commission put six companies on notice today, telling them in a warning letter that their warranty practices violate federal law. If you buy a car with a warranty, take it a repair shop to fix it, then have to return the car to the manufacturer, the car company isn't legally allowed to deny the return because you took your car to another shop. The same is true of any consumer device that costs more than $15, though many manufacturers want you to think otherwise.
Companies such as Sony and Microsoft pepper the edges of their game consoles with warning labels telling customers that breaking the seal voids the warranty. That's illegal. Thanks to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on. Dozens of companies do it anyway, and the FTC has put them on notice. Apple, meanwhile, routinely tells customers not to use third party repair companies, and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates.
Companies such as Sony and Microsoft pepper the edges of their game consoles with warning labels telling customers that breaking the seal voids the warranty. That's illegal. Thanks to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on. Dozens of companies do it anyway, and the FTC has put them on notice. Apple, meanwhile, routinely tells customers not to use third party repair companies, and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates.
"The use of" "parts is required to keep your" "manufacturerâ(TM)s warranties and any extended warranties intact"
https://www.hyundaiusa.com/myhyundai/manuals-and-how-tos/Getfaq?faqId=2&category=Consumer_Awareness
"This warranty shall not apply if this product" "is used with products not sold or licensed by"
https://www.nintendo.com/consumer/manuals/warrantytext_us.jsp
"This warranty does not apply if this product" "has had the warranty seal on the" "altered, defaced, or removed."
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/warranties/ps4/
You cannot take a Tesla to any repair shop you want. You have to take it to Tesla’s shop or else they will void your warranty.
Currently says (my enboldening):
They appear to be an exception to this rule at the moment.
Here's hoping the FTC takes notice of them, finally.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I can understand the use of these stickers on something like a mechanical hard drive, where opening the cover allows dust in which could damage it. I can't think of many other cases where it's warranted though.
That's great that the stickers are unlawful (as they should be) but what about things like fingerprint scanners on cell phones?
IIRC, there was an issue with Apple where the iPhone fingerprint lock wouldn't work if it was removed/replaced by a third party. This seems like a reasonable restriction from the customer's perspective.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Apple doesn't need stickers. They just use glue and impossible manufacturing methods
More like: once this catches Trump's attention (i.e., after a few CEOs raise hell) this guy will be forced out and will be replaced with a more conservative dope (probably someone who's on record as wanting to abolish the FTC)
Surely just using the device voids the warranty?
They aren't. They are required to honor problems not caused by the repairs or modifications.
What is your definition of sealed? My wrist watch is sealed to be water resistant to 300 meters. Yet I am allowed (expected even) to replace my own battery. The manufacture even suggests I replace the o-ring when I do. Yet the warranty is still valid against manufacture defect. Now doing that with a hard drive does seem to present a bit of a conundrum. A company could make the claim that opening a drive in any environment other than a clean room, would damage the drive. Warranties have traditionally never been valid for damage caused by the end user.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
So if I buy a device and remove the sticker for aesthetic purpose, is the warranty void?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I remember hearing a looooong time ago that this feature,
no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on
has been interpreted by the courts to mean that when a manufacturer offers either repair or replacement under warranty, they can't then state "at our option" because it limits the consumer's choices (even though many manufacturers do just that). And thus, that a consumer can, with sufficient motivation and resources, force a manufacturer to exercise the option the consumer wants rather than what the manufacturer selects.
Can anyone verify that my recollection is accurate?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Exactly on point
Yes, and in the sane world in which these consumer protections were put in place they'd update the law to fix that loophole and incur treble damages if the manufacturer has included what a reasonable person might conclude to be such components without publicly and freely documenting them.
It seems like exactly the kind of legislation that would never get passed in almost any era and would have been heavily lobbied against by nearly every US manufacturer. In 1975, the lack of easy access to data on pending bills, etc, also seems like it would have been easier to quietly kill a bill like this.
It also seems like the kind of bill that companies almost could have rallied their employee unions' to oppose, too. "This bill will cost us millions and we will be forced to cut jobs."
I suppose to corollary question is -- how come it hasn't been repealed or (repeatedly) gutted with exceptions for specific industries, especially automotive or other industries that got beat up by foreign manufacturers?
I would think what would get you (assuming a court didn't label all this standard industry practice in tech) is that the condition is effectively a thinly veiled blanket condition to prevent competition on repairs and components.
You can't just say cell phones must be worked on in a dry environment and we assume liquid caused micro-shorts if we didn't control that environment. You have to provide solid case specific investigation and rational to prove the damage was caused by the end user. So for your hard drive, they need to prove that the drive failed due to dust contamination not simply work from the assumption a clean room wasn't used for the repair.
Software updates regularly break iPhones that contain aftermarket parts.
If the aftermarket part worked with a previous version of the OS, there's no excuse for it NOT working with a newer version. I'm pretty sure Apple breaks far more phones than aftemarket parts do.
There are plenty of non-nefarious reasons why a software update might cause an aftermarket component to fail. For example - Apple specs an I/O chip for the screen digitizer that can respond to an interrupt in 10ms. However, currently there is some slow microcode in the I/O pipeline and the observed timing is more like 30ms.
Aftermarket manufacturers use the observed timings (because they don't have access to the design documents), and produce a replacement screen with an interrupt response tolerance of 20ms.
Later, Apple optimizes some code and now their I/O pipeline sends an interrupt every 15ms and includes it as part of a iOS update. This is well within the tolerances of the OEM part, but the aftermarket part starts behaving erratically.
Mfg Response: Fine, we just won't offer warranties at all then.
More like: once this catches Trump's attention (i.e., after a few CEOs raise hell) this guy will be forced out and will be replaced with a more conservative dope (probably someone who's on record as wanting to abolish the FTC)
Just curious, is EVERYTHING Trump's fault in your world?
Had a damaged disc drive from a drop and wouldn't read games so I took it to a local repair shop.
Local repair shop couldn't get the parts required to fix it.
Subsequently discovered fall damage was covered by warranty sent the Xbox one to Microsoft and was informed that they would not repair it at any price because the sticker had been removed by the local repair shop to inspect the damage.
Iirc ended having to mail it off to a professional place in Texas who was able to fix it for about $179
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Please rephrase "and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates" to "IPhone software upgrades regularly break aftermarket parts".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
repair yourself
The right to repair is an important part of ownership. Anything else and you start getting into "implied licensing" territory, which is exactly the bullshit John Deere pulls with their tractors.
or at an unlicensed shop voids the warranty
That sounds nice at first glance, but therein lies the problem. All a company like Apple has to do is license zero repair shops and suddenly they have a monopoly on device repairs. They can charge any amount, or outright refuse to repair anything they want.
No company should be expected to honor a warranty on devices that were broken or improperly repaired by tinkerers who don't know what they're doing.
Nobody is really saying they should be; however, the onus to prove the item was damaged by a failed repair job is on the warranty provider -- just as it is on them to prove you didn't mistreat it in other ways (drop in the toilet, put in the microwave, etc).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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There are items which when opened in improperly equipped repair shops should not be covered by warranties. Disk drives and CPUs come to mind. If I open a rotating platters disk drive looking for what is wrong the dust and debris that invades the drive renders it's operation extremely iffy. Such warranty seal breakage should be exempt. If somebody asks a third party to repair it then the third party should warrant the repair.
On the other hand opening the back of a TV set exposes nothing to dust or dirt damage that is exceptionally vulnerable. So if Hapless Harry opens the case, looks around, decides he is out of his depth, closes the case, and sends it for warranty repair it should be covered seals notwithstanding. But if he decaps some of those pretty rectangular thinguses inside, he's on his own.
{^_^}
Somewhat unrelated, but you should look up what "water resistant" means when applied to a wristwatch. I suspect it means something other than what you assume it does. But, moving along ...
The water resistant watch case and back should not be opened by laymen, simply because they might not re-assemble it correctly and lose that water resistant protection. I recommend you always take a watch to a Jeweler to replace the battery. You're right ... you don't *have to* do it that way, but unless the watch is fairly inexpensive ... well below $100 ... the risk vs reward doesn't really make sense.
I have some quartz watches that are only certified to be water resistant if sent to the manufacturer for battery replacement. They are expensive (more than $1000) Swiss made brands you would probably recognize. Do I think it necessary? Not really, but the risk of damage to a watch that costs that much if the seal isn't done correctly when opening and resetting the back case, versus the $20 and a week it costs, I won't chance it.
Lest one thinks this is all a money grab for Jewelers and Watch Brands I had a Swiss Army watch that had the battery replaced by a Jeweler that had water ingress. Because of how I had the battery replaced, I was able to get the Jeweler to replace the watch.
No, because the law recognizes that if you do not have the proper skill or equipment to repair a device and break it in the process of an attempted repair due to faulty equipment (like, say, using a non-clean room), you're allowed to keep both pieces but that's it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not everything. He ain't been in office long enough for that.
But it's curious, a lot of things that he did backfired badly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is why our law over here recognizes two distinct cases with these stickers: Parts and assembly (more to the point: warranty and guarantees).
The warranty of parts cannot be voided by removing the stickers (unless you start removing stickers from the parts themselves), but the warranty on the assembly can be voided. Or at least it would be on your to prove now what the CPU cooler was mounted the wrong way after you cooked off your i7. With intact stickers, there is no way the shop can weasel out of paying for it because obviously THEY made an assembly error. With the stickers gone, you have a hard time proving that it wasn't you trying to "improve" something in the way they put it together, botching it and toasting your CPU.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yet the warranty is still valid against manufacture defect.
Just against a defect. Water ingress however would be no such defect as you replaced a component that prevented water ingress yourself. Now if the manufacturer provided you the o-ring, and you proceeded to get it pressure tested to the manufacturer's specifications after and THEN the watch flooded while you're on a dive, you would have a case for a warranty claim.
What part on the inside of a hard driver are you actually going to replace yourself? Only in some extreme cases would someone open up a drive to try to get the data off the platters on to a new drive, where would you even get replacement parts?
Back in the 90s I worked as a field tech for PC hardware - everything from printers to laptops to monitors. Name brands like Dell, HP, Apple, and so on. I had manufacturer training courses and was supplied with the special tools, and special phone numbers for support.
I was never told to look for those stickers, which often appeared across seams you'd open if you needed to access the devices. They were never mentioned once. I also did not have any way to even get hold of them if I wanted to replace one after destroying it myself during authorized warranty service.
So, there's that.
Perfectly Normal Industries