Gateway Customer Sues to Get His PC Fixed

prostoalex writes "The Sacramento Bee tells the story of an El Dorado resident who had to go to small claims court to get his Gateway PC fixed: 'Right out of the box, he says, the computer displayed scattered graphics and wouldn't work properly. He says he called a Gateway salesman five times and sent him an e-mail to get an authorization number to send the computer back, but his phone calls and message were never returned. Then, over the course of months, Sheehan said he called Gateway technical support dozens of times.' Gateway insists that by clicking 'Accept' on a customer service EULA when the computer was first booted, Mr. Sheehan has waived his rights to sue the computer manufacturer in United States courts. The Gateway EULA states that conflicts must be resolved via private arbitrage. Sheehan, though, argues that he never saw the EULA, because of the broken graphics. As such, he's not held to that agreement." Some connections between this and a discussion about a Second Life case we had yesterday.

Bullshit

[nighty5]

Some awesome legalise there.

Regardless if a user accepts a EULA, its actually against the law to unlawfully restrict their rights in tapping into some legal protection for sale of faulty goods. Well it is in Australia, I'm sure the US has similar laws to protect consumers.

Don't accept this garbage - I'm glad his fighting for his rights to receive what was intended - a working product.

Taking advantage of the dupe

[zaguar]

EULAs are not meant to be read.
Seriously. Have you? Can you keep a straight face and tell me you read all those legalese crap? I didn't.

First of all, it can be summed up into "We may do everything, you may do nothing, essentially, you're a dork for using our software". And second, almost all of them violate our consumer protection laws.

So, why bother wasting time?

Re:Dupe tag, anyone?

[gEvil (beta)]

These tags will alert us to problems immediately (but they won't show up on the top tags list).

And what happens once the editor has been "alerted"? My guess is they might go "Oh, whoops" and then move along to go post the next dupe...

That's a silly thing to say.

[Runefox]

I wouldn't buy a Gateway computer before reading that/this article.