Sony Sued Over Bricked PS3s 438
Zarrot writes "If Sony's recent 3.00 PS3 firmware update bricked your console, you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony. The complaint alleges that thousands of users (PDF) were affected by the update, and in some cases the PS3 hardware itself was damaged. It continues, 'For owners who sustained hardware damage from the Sony-required update, Sony is charging a $150 repair fee per unit. Sony, responding to the numerous complaints about the unacceptable effects of the defective update, released a further, optional update that it claimed "improves system stability" — yet performance problems continued, and the new update did nothing to remedy the systems of users who sustained hardware damage."'"
XCP on steroids! (Score:4, Insightful)
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. Is it possible that this was deliberate? After all, they deliberately rooted thousands of PCs (inclusing mine) a few years ago, so you KNOW they're evil even by corporate standards, and they're charging $150 to fix a problem that their "update" caused.
They won't brick MY PS3, because there's no way in hell I'll buy another product from the company that rooted my computer with a trojan in a music CD. Why do people keep buying stuff from this company? I won't -- once bitten, twice shy. Buy from Sony and you're asking to get screwed, with sand as lube.
Bricked Consoles? (Score:5, Insightful)
So now Nintendo and Sony have both managed to brick consoles with firmware updates. Great.
Sorry, fellas. YOU broke it, YOU don't get to bill US to fix your mistakes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Bricked? (Score:4, Insightful)
When are people going to learn to NOT buy Sony? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony is REPEATEDLY caught doing nefarious things. Rootkits on a CD. Deleting 2/3rds of a MMO (The Star Wars Galaxies NGE) the day after selling an expansion for it, which included features marketed that applied to the 2/3rds that got deleted. They've gotten caught multiple times price fixing CDs. They have released a version of the PSP, called the PSPGo that requires you to repurchase all your games. They've also been caught deploying astroturfers and viral marketers to fake reviews and artificially pump their products.
They also run what I believe is an illegal international lottery with respect to their "trading" card games in their MMOs.
So why would it surprise anyone that Sony, not exactly well known for the quality of their coding work (if SOE is representative of it) would release a buggy firmware that destroys hardware and then make people pay $150 to fix their own defect?
Sony is all about revenue streams! Stealing from their customers is just yet another one of those.
This suit is going to cost them millions and will no doubt harm their reputation even more than all of the above have. Sony must not care about their reputation, since they do nothing at all constructive to improve it. Hint: repeatedly assfucking your customers does NOT a good reputation make.
Re:Legal Recourse (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think about it, wouldn't it hurt Sony more if everyone that was harmed by Sony's "update" took them to small claims court? They'd have to send a lawyer & in some jurisdictions, they'd actually have to send an officer of the company. If no one shows up, they lose by default. Class action lawsuits are there to make things easier on the legal system & on lawyers, but you know what? Screw both of them.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony claiming the hardware is licensed, not sold in 3... 2... 1...
Re:Sony is no longer a reputable vendor (Score:5, Insightful)
That can happen to anybody - all vendors have some lemons. The question is, how many and how do they handle it when they sold you something with a problem? A good vendor will take care of it to the best of their ability and leave you with as little problems as possible - a bad vendor will ignore you.
I got an outdated DPT RAID controller from a friend a decade ago. It had problems cooperating with my BIOS - it would only boot correctly (exactly) every second time, or something like that. Not something that was a big deal to me, and the card was about five years old at that time (and I was not the original owner). However, I sent them an email to just ask if they had a solution. They immediately (as in same day, and without me asking for it) sent me new firmware chips by Fedex. Shipping came to $70 - more than the card was worth on the second hand market.
I've had other vendors that have driven out in the middle of the night with replacement servers when I suspected that there was a problem with one of the servers they'd delivered.
It's not the failure - it's the failure to handle the failure.
Eivind.
Re:When are people going to learn to NOT buy Sony? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that surprises me is that out of the seven billion people on this planet, there are enough of them dumb enough to buy ANYTHING from a company like this for it to stay in business.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:5, Insightful)
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. Is it possible that this was deliberate? After all, they deliberately rooted thousands of PCs (inclusing mine) a few years ago, so you KNOW they're evil even by corporate standards, and they're charging $150 to fix a problem that their "update" caused.
They won't brick MY PS3, because there's no way in hell I'll buy another product from the company that rooted my computer with a trojan in a music CD. Why do people keep buying stuff from this company? I won't -- once bitten, twice shy. Buy from Sony and you're asking to get screwed, with sand as lube.
Despite my being a Nintendo fanboy and somebody who despises Sony, I can't follow you with the pitchfork on this one. This sort of scam requires exreme levels of short-sighted-stupidity and greed, that Microsoft hasn't even reached. There's no way any guy wearing a tie there is going to see that as profitable even after the legal settlements.
Brick happens.
And when they win (Score:5, Insightful)
After all that, if they win, every customer will get their machine fixes for free but with a 4-6 week turn around time, they customer will still have to pay $20-$35 for shipping the borked machine back, and get a nice voucher for $35 to reimburse the shipping cost usable in the Playstation Online store. Meanwhile the lawyers will get a multi-million dollar paycheck out of the victory.
Sony - 0
Consumer - 1
Lawyers - 10
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine for the same reason that nobody went to prison over XCP. If I'd done to one of their computers what they did to mine, I'd be in prison right now.
Class Action? Phht! (Score:5, Insightful)
Great -- so affected users have a shot at getting a check for like, eight dollars in acouple of years while some lawyer gets rich. Gotta love that...
Re:Bricked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because I obviously bought my PS3 for the great internet browser...
That's not really the point.
"Bricked" came from the idea that the piece of hardware is "as useful as a brick" because it's unable to operate *at all*.
Now, obviously this sort of thing greatly reduces the usefulness of the device, but your statement itself shows that the device is *not*bricked*. Just broken.
Re:Bricked Consoles? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story isn't the system getting bricked, but having users pay for the fix. If a Ford breaks down that is fine. It is a Ford and I expected it to happen sooner or later, but if a Ford rep shows up in my driveway and tells me that he needs to "fix something" before I can drive it and his fix causes my engine to melt, I'll damn sure expect him to fix it or at least pay for the damages.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:1, Insightful)
The rootkit Sony placed on their CDs and an update which bricks a percentage of current-gen consoles are two different beasts. As tech-oriented people we know what a rootkit is, how to find it, and why it's evil. The general public, for the most part, would have no idea that they were rooted silently when they put the CD in their drive. Rendering inoperable a current-gen console that is at the forefront of your business is something you can't miss, nor does it make sense. Yes, putting a rootkit on their albums was a sneaky and evil thing to do, but it makes a certain sense from an evil-business perspective. Burning and alienating your userbase in a blatant way that even the most technological unsavvy will notice does not make a bit of sense. Are they idiots for releasing a forced update that had potential to wreck systems? Yes. But your raging hate-on for all things Sony does not mean they did it deliberately, nor that a completely non-fuctioning console is the same as a silently-rooted PC.
Re:Bricked? (Score:2, Insightful)
Although that may have been the original slang definition of the word, it has changed over time to mean anything that has failed. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bricked)
In a similar example, goodbye was originally a statement meaning 'god be with you'. Now it is simply a parting.
A gaming console that can't play games or a DVD player that can't read DVDs is a failure and can be declared as 'bricked'.
Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do all the +5 Insightful comments have NOTHING to do with the article? Just "DONT BUY SONY THEYRE TEH EVILZ!" This is as bad as it used to be with Microsoft articles back in the day.
To all of the DONT BUY SONY CUZ THEYRE TEH EVILZ can you recommend me which game console to buy? Oh and please don't say PC, I game hours a day on my PC but I also like having a console for the console only games. Please tell me which console is not made by an evil corporation and doesn't brick with firmware upgrades? The ROCK SOLID 360? The Wii and it's recent hardware killing firmware too? Guess what, I'm going to buy the console that has the games I want. For me that's the PS3 and soon the Wii.
For the record my PS3, and the PS3's of my friends (yes, I know others with them) haven't bricked, so this is far from a EVERYONES PS3 JUST DIED that some people like to make it out to be. Saying don't buy a PS3 because SoE sucks or they released a rootkit 4 years ago is up there with saying don't buy Microsoft because Bob sucked or because they killed Netscape. Pretty much EVERY major corporation has done something evil.
Feel free to mod me down, I got some Karma to burn.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:2, Insightful)
I might be fuzzy on the details, but wasn't the rooting thing the result of buying a 3rd party DRM solution? Yes, yes it was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Copy_Protection [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaMax_CD-3 [wikipedia.org]
Sony didn't build the software, nor do I think the intent was to damage PCs. Most likely, they fell to marketing hype from these companies claiming their copy protection systems couldn't be broken.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I ran out of gas and now my car is bricked! (Score:1, Insightful)
Honesty dude, it's bad enough when you blame the OP for something like that, when if in fact your definition was correct, we would not have terms like "de-bricking" flying around in IT-land when speaking of fixing wifi routers and the like.
Read my subject line.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:4, Insightful)
Politicians call it "plausable deniability". I seriously doubt that any details on what the rootkit would do to a user's computer were withheld from Sony, including disabling all CD-burning software and P2P software. My daughter unwillingly installed XCP on my PC, never dreaming that a major corporation would be VANDALS.
There's no way you'll convince me that Sony didn't know that XCP would disable P2P and CD burning software. That was its primary purpose, and it was nothing short of vandalism. Someone should have gone to prison for XCP.
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Insightful)
Accursed truth speaker! Our people cast out the last of your kind on the eve of the Vista! Take your words and leave this place, lest we get our spears and you learn why they call this place slashdot!
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
To all of the DONT BUY SONY CUZ THEYRE TEH EVILZ can you recommend me which game console to buy? Oh and please don't say PC, I game hours a day on my PC but I also like having a console for the console only games. Please tell me which console is not made by an evil corporation and doesn't brick with firmware upgrades? The ROCK SOLID 360? The Wii and it's recent hardware killing firmware too? Guess what, I'm going to buy the console that has the games I want. For me that's the PS3 and soon the Wii.
Wait... what? You're so desperately addicted to console games that the answer "none of the above" simply isn't palatable to you? Might I suggest that you have a problem for which you should seek psychiatric help?
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:4, Insightful)
So - what's left Microsoft?
The company that gave us the xbox360 red ring of death?
Choose your poison, because its all poison.
Me, I choose Nintendo, because at least they aren't trying to take control of my home media center the way sony and microsoft are. That and I've actually had postive experiences with their customer support. They replaced my Wii sports disc for nothing because it was scratched. They sent out those complimentary rubber shells for the wii remotes a few months after I purchased it. No company is perfect, but I find it hard to work up a real hate on for Nintendo. I don't even have to try for Sony or Microsoft.
On a GAME CONSOLE? Shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a software engineer, I feel some sympathy for those who release patches for desktop computer OSes. A computer is a general-purpose device that is intended to allow users to install third-party applications that have full access to a huge API; to install applications like antivirus utilities that dig deep into the OS; and add hardware and the low-level drivers that go with them. The OS update is applied to an environment that may have wandered far from its starting point. Every customer has a unique configuration that probably has meaningful differences from any box in the SQA department.
But a game console? A game console is a walled garden, the applications need only a circumscribed set of functions, the vendor has total control over what goes on it, and nobody is adding third-party hardware to it.
Sony should be ashamed of itself, and should have volunteered to fix damaged systems for free--long before anyone complained.
Re:When are people going to learn to NOT buy Sony? (Score:2, Insightful)
If that's your kind of decision making I would have fired you years ago, but with /.'s huge SWG fanboy pool your reasoning probably seems perfectly valid and sane.
There are reasons for excluding bidders but nerd rage over SWG isn't one of them.
Re:XCP on steroids! (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>The decent thing for Sony to do is pay up. However, they may not be legally required to do so
My understanding of the law, based upon the results from the Paypal case, is that agreements do not overrule State or National Law. You might sign an agreement that says "no warranty provided" but the consumer protection laws would nullify that agreement as invalid, and force the manufacturer to replace the broken hardware, or else face massive government-imposed fines.
And if that doesn't work, the customers can organize a boycott of all Sony products from now to the end of time.
Sony might end-up the same place Circuit City is now.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhhhh the unique experience of having like 5 good games to play with your shiny black $400 blu-ray player. (1 of which is suprisingly not a sequel) Good thing at least Final Fantasy XIII will redeem your purchase....errr..maybe not. I'd like to give you a unique experience. Drink a little more of that kool aid, kid.