There's a difference between a manufacturing defect and a design defect, in law. Manufacturing defects can happen sporadically to any products. But a known design defect needs to be corrected before manufacture. If it isn't, and it can be proven that the company knew or should have known about it, they can be held liable, and punitive damages may be possible. A case such as this, where MS pushed knowingly defective hardware on unsuspecting consumers, is perfect for product liability. Sure, we're not talking Ford Pinto here, so damages per individual are going to be low. I'd love to see people get $10-20 per trip to UPS with a dead console. I think that would be fair.
Thanks, that does clear things up a fair amount. I plan on looking into it a bit further in the near future, but I just did a quick check and am still kind of unsure how much that applies for two reasons. The first being that the examples I saw (note, I only checked two, and they're internet sites) only really cited design vs. manufacturing defects in regards to personal injury. That kind of brings up my original question; apart from the heavily regulated automobile industry, do you really have any sort of legally binding guarantee on the quality of the products you buy? By honouring a warranty, is a company skirting legal responsibility? Basically, is inconvenience grounds for a lawsuit like this when dealing with a consumer luxury item. I'm fairly certain that in Canada it isn't (we don't even have lemon laws). Personal injury,however, is a completely different level of broad liability. Sure, there are other ways of punishing a company for doing things like this through lawsuits, but generally they require a much higher burden of proof which in this case isn't likely to exist. Just knowingly selling a product with a short lifespan and not warning people isn't grounds for suit here because private citizens (and most companies) have no obligation of full 100% disclosure. Similarly, I can sell my neighbour a car that is completely fucked and he can't sue me unless I fucked up in other way somehow during the sale - if even then. Again, that's here, I don't know about there.
The second thing that leaves me uncertain while looking that up was that I don't know if this really is a case of it being a design defect. Let me rephrase that - I think it is a design defect, but I don't know if the law would consider it a design defect. To illustrate, one of the examples I just read stated something like "If a stool falls over because it has three legs in an unstable configuration it's a design defect. If it falls over because of faulty bolts it's a manufacturing defect. They also define design defects as "intended defects with unforeseen consequences" whereas manufacturing are "unintentional".
Personally, I'd agree that it seems like you could very easily argue either way. I tend to side with you and saying it's a design defect because there's obviously a reason you don't use cheap and lead free solder (still banned in medical equipment as far as I know) in certain applications and the whole high percentage of the production run being faulty thing. But, again, I don't really know anything about this and I imagine a lawyer with a fast mouth and well versed in this aspect of law could probably sway my opinion pretty easily.
I don't know. It's kind of a shame because shit like this does need to go down more often and companies need to be held accountable for for selling shoddy products. I hope it goes somewhere and Cobra's idea of a fair settlement sounds like a good way of going about it. I find it kind of interesting and will watch to see where it's going.
