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the legal remedy goes something like " it is an offense to sell a device then retroactively reduce function or demand further payment beyond the original purchase price "

now we need the legal team and the class action, good thing for me im not a lawyer.



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Lawyer here. Pure speculation/not legal advice:

Theoretically, people who purchased complain to their state attorney general or report the manufacturers to the FTC. There might be some recompense under consumer fraud laws. If enough people had bought them, there might be enough people to form a class action (doubtful though).

The problem is that amount of $ involved here is just not something anyone is likely to get up in arms about. It's $5. Most people will just write it off and never think about it again. No lawyer would bother either unless there were 10,000s of consumers willing to come forward and complain.

Just one of those shitty situations. Caveat emptor.


Where is the class-action lawsuit? TOS be damned, people bought a product with an advertised spec and that spec was later intentionally crippled.

I would love to see this happen. How do we actually bring a class action or some other thing that effectively means they can't do this anymore?

Isn't there a class action to that effect?

A class action which may cost the manufacturer 10s of millions of dollars. Yeah, you only get a small check. Yeah, the lawyers get a lot. But what other remedy does the average consumer have against this type of subtle but abusive behavior.

I'm not a lawyer so I can't answer the question, but it will defintely complicate going to court, and I'm confident that the company has more lawyers and more money for lawyers than the average user. A class action suit may follow, but only if enough people and lawyers are willing, and it'll likely end up with a pittance in damages paid in a settlement, eventually.

If that’s true, can’t there be some consumer class-action applied?

I'm not a lawyer but it sounds like a class action lawsuit would be a good idea in this case (and a nice payday for lawyers involved).

So can we now file a class action suit for all those times they told us it would be illegal to not charge a fee for upgrading?

Class action is often prohibited through terms that force you to act solely and also they require arbitration. This sort of thing should be banned and made retroactive.

What about a class action lawsuit? Surely there are some tech-oriented lawyers trawling HN/etc for class action ideas by now.

That might work until the class action gets filed.

This situation seems ripe for a class action.

This looks like a perfect class action case. There's really no physical harm or financial harm to the users, but a class action might be the only way for it to hurt. But IANAL, and probably have it all wrong in my head???

There probably will be a class action lawsuit.

Class action?

I would bet that neither small claims or class action is possible in the US because ASUS has a forced binding arbitration clause in their End User Agreement that almost no one read when they activated their phones.

This is why class action lawsuits exist. I can throw my $20 in with a thousand other people who all have the same problem.

Or, more likely, when looking at that big a settlement, we can find a lawyer who works on contingency.


Seems like it's easily effecting enough end consumers that "class action" could be a real possibility.
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