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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.
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 think the original idea of the stickers was to keep users from mucking around in their own devices trying to fix something and just breaking it worse. So the warranty would be voided in those cases. But I am sure plenty of companies use that excuse to also block third-party repairs since they too would have to break the seal.
I believe in this case, they're inferring that "intact" means "complete" - so technically, if you swap your air cleaner assembly with an aftermarket version, that part would not be considered under warranty any more (even though the rest of the vehicle still is), and thus the warranty is no longer "intact."
Basically, they're using weasel wording to imply a complete loss of warranty even when that's not the case. Shitty way to treat your customers.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That is likely a security "feature" to prevent an attacker from using a fingerprint "spoofer" to gain access to the device. So they probably signed the hardware so only that specific sensor can work with that particular phone. Allowing the user to pair an unknown sensor would make the signing stuff pointless. If you force people to bring it into an apple store, maybe you can reduce demand for stolen and hacked phones since they wont work.
That might be their thought process anyway.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
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.
I'm not denying its value, but I don't grok your explanation.
We expect the items in the grocery store to be safe to eat thanks to the Pure Food and Drug act (among others) that long predated Magnuson-Moss. It's not like we didn't have a consumer market before it was passed, either.
It seems like exactly the kind of law that would have been blocked as too much regulation and burdensome on manufacturers without really any effect on the market, or with whatever disparate effects it had before.
I'm not knocking it, it's obviously a cornerstone of consumer rights, but it's such a cornerstone I'm mystified that it made it into law.
It's like they never heard of the Magnuson-Moss Act.
Or they just hope their customers have never heard of it.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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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I don't know about the US law but warranty normally only covers manufacturing defects.
If you botch the repair and break the product by doing so, it is not a defect, and I don't see why they should fix your mistakes.
From what I understand, here is the idea: you break your phone screen, and repair it. Now you notice the new screen causes problems, you can't get warranty because what the seller sold you isn't defective. However, if your screen works well and a memory chip is defective, warranty works, because the problem comes from the original product. That's unless they can prove that the new screen caused the problem.
Also, what happens if in the process of fixing the memory chip defect, the original manufacturer damage your new screen because it is more fragile? Can they send back the phone with the now fixed chip and damaged screen and you now have to ask for warranty support from the one who sold you the screen...
Similar things happen everywhere there are consumer protection law...
For instance in europe someone who sells you a product is required to provide a 2 year guarantee, but most manufacturers will loudly advertise a 1 year guarantee and then in small print "your statutory rights are not affected", meaning that the 1 year guarantee is a service provided by the manufacturer and unrelated to the one you get by law. They will then intentionally not train their support staff on the legislation, knowing that most customers are unaware of the law and won't assert their rights. Those who do know their rights usually have to push to be escalated to someone higher up who does understand the law.
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