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Judge Rules Amazon Isn't Liable For Damages Caused By a Hoverboard It Sold (cnbc.com)
Earlier this week, a judge in Tennessee ruled that Amazon isn't liable for damages caused by a hoverboard that spontaneously exploded and burned down a family's house, even though they bought it on Amazon's website. "The plaintiff claimed that Amazon didn't properly warn her about the dangers they knew existed with the product, but the judge didn't agree," reports CNBC. At the time, hoverboards were all the rage; Amazon sold almost 250,000 of them over a 30-day period. The plaintiff claims the company had an obligation to warn customers properly about the dangers it knew existed. "[The plaintiff] bought the hoverboard on Amazon, the receipt came from Amazon, the box had an Amazon label and all the money was in Amazon's hands," adds CNBC. "[The plaintiff] has been unable to find the Chinese manufacturer of the device." From the report: It's the latest legal victory for Amazon, which has for years fended off litigation related to product quality and safety by arguing that, for a big and growing part of its business, it's just a marketplace. There are buyers on one end and sellers on the other -- the argument goes -- and Amazon connects them through a popular portal, facilitating the transaction with a sophisticated logistics system. The courts are reinforcing the power of Amazon's business model as the ultimate middleman. But for American consumers, there's growing cause for concern. [...] But if Amazon isn't liable when faulty products sold through its website cause personal injuries and property damage, customers are often left with no recourse. That's because it's frequently impossible for consumers to figure out who manufactured the defective product and hold that party responsible.
"[The plaintiff] has been unable to find the Chinese manufacturer of the device."
If Amazon can't put the buyer in contact with the company which produced the device, then they should be liable. They sold it, they should be responsible for it. Frankly, even if they can put the person in contact, they should still be responsible, and recovering damages from the supplier should be their problem.
We have consumer protection laws for a reason, and that reason is that not having them costs everyone money. This decision simply lets Amazon push the cost of doing business off onto the court system, which means We The People have to pay for their cost of doing business.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just advise shoppers that they use the products Amazon sells at their own risk - with no guarantees, implied or otherwise.
Doing this would be similar to the "guarantees" we get on software.
How about that?
I do not think the issue is Amazon in this case: it is Chinese sellers and customer protection in a globalized world in general.
I had once bought a game key on Ebay and the Chinese seller refused to send it to me without me sending him a copy of my ID for age verification. Understandably, the last thing I want to do is sending some guy in China is the information on my ID. I asked for a refund and the seller refused, copy-pasting the same message about how I should give him a good review first. I contacted Ebay, then PayPal, none of whom wanted to help me with my issue despite the seller being marked with all of Ebay’s trusted symbols. The very young-sounding customer support person actually said that I “have the reigns in my hands and should threaten the seller with bad reviews until he refunds me”. I then reported the seller for “review extortion”, which is an offense under Ebay’s own terms of conduct, Ebay confirmed that review extortion had taken place and refused to help me with my refund.
At this point, I gave the Chinese bastard a snarky yet positively-marked review and he returned my money. I am confident that there is a library worth of similar stories that never made it into the court room due to being less high-profile. All of these companies are utter trash when it comes to third party seller customer protection.
No one is responsible for anything, at any time, anywhere. No rules, no regulations, anything goes. You all remember voting for this, right?
we're left putting our hopes in California. Man I wish the rest of the country could get with the program on consumer safety.
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I'm fairly certain that #1 is already in place, and my guess is that #2 is being contested by Amazon, that Amazon is claiming something to the effect that they're more like a postal service than a store. If I have that right, then I wholeheartedly side against Amazon in this case; whether or not they're "like" a store or a delivery service in a traditional sense, they're a new kind of entity and we need tech laws to keep up with new tech entities. I don't think Amazon should be required to do consumer device testing, but IF there is an available database (from a regulatory entity) documenting harm, Amazon absolutely should be required to present that information at the point of sale.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Seriously, Walmart/Target management are the ones behind having Chinese copy American patented goods. BUT, conservatives judges want to blame the manufacturer who was contacted by Walmart/Target to build such items.
In fact,the 7-9 manufacturers that work for these 2 companies are the ones that likely made the hoover boards, which were copies of an American company.
At what point do American companies get held responsible since the CHinese, and in general, all non-western companies, are not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We have consumer protection laws for a reason, and that reason is that not having them costs everyone money. This decision simply lets Amazon push the cost of doing business off onto the court system, which means We The People have to pay for their cost of doing business.
So your entire underlying assumption is society is responsible for protecting someone who gets on the internet to find the cheapest piece of Chinesium crap from some seller engaged in Alibabatrage?
Ummm, WHY?!?!?!
I'm not sure I can explain it in smaller words than I did above. When people get hurt because they are dumb and do dumb things, it costs us all money, and it actually turns out to be cheaper for all of us to protect them from doing extremely dumb things. When someone burns their house down, it might burn your house down. They might have to move and consequently not do their job, which has downstream ripple effects that also cost other people money.
Also, keep in mind that people don't even have to be dumb, just uneducated. In part because we have these consumer protection laws, people have gotten used to the idea that stuff they buy from major retailers won't burn their house down. Between the circuit overload protection devices in their homes which are legally mandated, and the usual legally mandated consumer protections that we have come to enjoy here in the supposedly greatest nation in the world, this is usually a safe assumption.
Does this mean that people are getting used to taking less responsibility for themselves in certain areas? Yes, it does. But no one can reasonably be expected to be educated in all areas. The world is simply too complex for that. Given that, isn't it valid to offer people some basic protection? Is there actually some public interest in permitting companies to sell batteries which are best marketed as incendiary devices as if it were a good idea to bring them into your homes? In my book, that's a form of fraud. These devices were utterly unfit for their stated purpose, and constituted a significant public hazard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... the piracy issue.
ISPs are the middle man, simply connecting content providers to consumers.
The owners of the IP have a hard time precisely identifying, and litigating, those on either end, so the effort turns to making the provider soak up the liability.
Shooting the messenger.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm sick and tired of all this "Both sides are bad" garbage.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
> I'm not sure I can explain it in smaller words than I did above. When people get hurt because they are dumb and do dumb things, it costs us all money,
So what?
That's no reason to pretend that adults are expected to be responsible for themselves or to destroy the underlying mechanisms that allow you to be clothed and fed.
Living in a free society means that you are free to be a moron. The answer is not to ban people like you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
To be fair, nobody should be purchasing Chrysler or Dodge anyway. How many times do they have to be listed as the least reliable cars for people to care?
What about selling an autopilot which does not automatically pilot?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, I generally refuse to buy from Amazon at all, but I NEVER buy third party from Amazon. The first time I ordered a used book from Amazon, the money disappeared, but the book never showed up, and Amazon disavowed all responsibility. Since then I never buy third party goods from Amazon. If it's a new book, and the local book store can't order it for me, I order directly from the publisher. There have been 2 or 3 exceptions over the last decade. And the last thing I bought from Amazon that wasn't a book was a box of Penguin mints...nearly a decade ago now. Even then I was tending to avoid Amazon.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Approximately nobody wants to be a scooter that will burn their house down. Especially nobody wants their next door neighbor to buy one that ends up burning down your house too.
That's an entirely different thing from products that simply aren't well made, cheap Chinese products that break after a month of use. Sometimes I DO want a cheap product that I only need for a couple of uses. Market forces can more or less work for overall quality, though of course no system is perfect.
Consider also the difference between these:
1. You may not sell cheap stuff made in China.
2. If you sell dangerously defective things, you're responsible for injuries and damages your products cause.
There is a difference between the government deciding what you can and can't do vs the common-sense principle that you are responsible for the results of your actions.
Here buyers are suing in civil court to recover damages caused by Amazon selling dangerously defective goods. This isn't a criminal charge, the government putting people in jail for not doing what they are told. This is a private, consensual transaction - Amazon listed scooters for sale, the consumer paid Amazon for a fun scooter. Amazon instead delivered a fire bomb. The consumer asks that Amazon compensate them for the damage caused by the item Amazon sent them.
There's lots of cheap 3D printers that'll happily burn your house down. People on the forums know what parts are dangerous and how to fix them so they're LESS LIKELY to go up in flames but... recently it was noticed that actually most don't have basic firmware protection against runaway heating. Let's say your heating element falls off and gets drug around. Most printers won't detect this and will crank the heat up full blast since it can't read the temperature anymore. FWOOSH.
Yet you can buy these kits with no warnings or instructions how to make them safe. Yeah, amazon too. How many houses have to burn down before they do some basic safety checks in the products they sell?
Now it's even less than that.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
If I buy faulty Tylenol, do I get to sue the store I bought it from?
Yes, I believe you do.
Why does it change when the company isn't reputable?
As far as I know, it doesn't.
Those people did not, and since they couldn't, or wouldn't, find the manufacturer, thy went after Amazon.
Which is where they went wrong. They should have gone after the seller instead.
...what I already knew: Amazon is no better than eBay when it comes to costumer responsibility practices.
Just recently I read a post about fake SD cards still being a thing on Amazon, and this has been going on for the better part of the last decade, so it's quite obvious that Amazon simply doesn't care anymore.
But I've stopped buying on Amazon anyways back since they adopted an extremely aggressive tactic of pre-charging some 120~150% import tax for people living in my country. Brazil does have a very pricy import tax, but it's definitely not as high as Amazon is charging, and the only reason why they'd do something like that would be if they just don't want to bother dealing with our market anymore.
But that's fine... it forced me to look for alternatives, and I'm glad I did.
"Also, keep in mind that people don't even have to be dumb, just uneducated."
Also, keep in mind that people don't even have to be uneducated, just unable to meet an implausible threshold for information gathering. Even if we consider just Slashdot readers, how many could determine whether these devices were actually safely constructed without buying one? My PhD in Electrical Engineering and 14 years in the industry don't mean I can conjure test results out of thin air.
A prerequisite for an efficient free market is information symmetry. Why do you hate capitalism?
"I mean for God's sake, they used to sell opium products as teething pain relief for babies"
Hate to break it to you but it's not just damn furriners that used to do that. it was made and sold in the USA up until 2011, and in Europe Bayer sold medicinal heroin. In Blighty Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric syrup had forty-six percent alcohol, one and three-sixteenth "grains of opium per ounce," and contained a dosage chart that included five-day-old infants. They were to be given five drops of the stuff, which quieted them down. Two-week-olds got eight drops. Five-year-olds got twenty-five drops. An adult got a teaspoon.
Pretty simple really, do your homework and know what you're buying, then shop price. Don't just search for the cheapest POS you can find in some broad category. There is good stuff and bad stuff out there, don't buy the bad stuff.
If you buy something, a question to ask is "who do I sue?". If you can't identify the party to sue, or they're not exactly reachable using the legal system, then maybe the small price may not be that good.
The usual approach is "meh, made in China" and throw it out and buy another one. But that's when things just die on you rather than explode and burn your house down.
If the local courts can't get to you, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to sell direct to the market. You should get an importer to handle the legals and take the heat. Bypass that and it's contraband.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
No they went after the money. Amazon=Billions. Kim Sung's Flybynight Exports=a couple thousand yen.
If you buy a defective product from Target would you sue the cashier? No? But she took your money, she gave you the product, she's the seller... right? No? This is no different. Its just that the scale is different. Is the party store responsible if there is a mouse in your beer. No. Is a car dealer responsible for a manufacturers defect. No. Is your pharmacy responsible for a bad batch of viagra? No. The fact is we have a lot of people here operating off emotional biases, focusing their hate on the big bad company and ignoring the facts. If this family had bought the device at the little mom and pop store on the corner that's been there 60 years would the same people think they should lose their business, home and life savings? Are they prepared to give up their homes if they sell an item in a garage sale that breaks? But it's ok if it's the "bad" company. This is the same reasoning that convicts innocent minorities because, 'well they look like thugs they probably did something wrong'.
What about selling an autopilot which does not automatically pilot?
Before activating the feature for a new buyer, Tesla makes the limitations of the system clear and even gets the buyer to acknowledge that they understand their responsibilities. Amazon deliberately hid the fact that hoverboards were combusting. There is literally no parallel to be drawn there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm going to take a what is effectively a skateboard and attach a motor to it powered by a lithium ion battery (a product well know to be be potentially unstable and a fire hazard). Then I'm going to sell it to people who think that putting a motor and what is effectively a skateboard is a good idea.
What could possibly go wrong?