That's unreasonable, wouldn't be practical, and goes against precedent.
The analogy here is if you buy a vacuum cleaner from a store and it doesn't work because of a defect. You bring it back and get your money back.
The store isn't required to provide you with another working vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum cleaner is no longer manufactured, they're not required to find one in mint condition on eBay that's 10x or 100x the price.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.
On the contrary, this is with the precedent, damages due to breach of contract, theft, destruction of property, etc are cost to replace not the original cost. And specific performance (i.e. requiring someone perform the action to fulfill the contract) is available if monetary damages aren't calculable (i.e. there is no replacement on the market).
It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”. That’s in addition to any separate clauses that disclaim any and all explicit warranty. I’ve never signed a contract without such a clause and would bet it’s already a part of all of these terms of service.
Yes... because warranties are optional guarantees of fitness being sold on top of the product. We aren't talking about a warranty on the product here, we are talking about the product itself, I have never seen a contract that says "oh, and we can steal the product back from you in exchange for monies actually received", unsurprisingly, outside of digital assets.
And of course that term is common because the default terms for damages can go beyond that (e.g. if replacement value rises).
It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”.
And it's standard for statutory consumer protection laws to override any contractual terms and sometimes even make it illegal for vendors to suggest or imply that restrictions on the consumer's legal rights exist, at least in jurisdictions where consumer protection laws have teeth. Otherwise, every vendor (the big guy) could just require every consumer (the little guy) to sign away all their theoretical consumer rights as part of the purchase contract, and the theoretical rights would be worthless in practice.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.
This is why concepts like opportunity cost and consequential loss exist. While your arguments here seem reasonable, it is also reasonable to argue that harm has still been caused to the consumer, if they originally had a choice of vendors to buy from, a bad one they initially chose has refunded (only) their original purchase price, but the current market price is significantly higher.
If the basic principle of awarding compensation for damages is to make someone whole to the extent that this is possible, then the consumer in that scenario does still have something to complain about. This seems particularly relevant with digital products, where copies are entirely fungible and if the consumer has lost access they previously enjoyed then this was the result of the vendor's decisions around the technology, either actively revoking the access or deleting the material somehow, or taking some action like switching off a DRM server that indirectly causes the same end result.
Comparing physical objects to digital one is absolutely ludicrous. It costs almost nothing to copy a digital work.
The store does not lock your access to your vacuum while it's in your home. This may happen in the future with cars for example. Imagine you driving and suddenly your car dies because the car company "banned" you and locked your car.
> This may happen in the future with cars for example. Imagine you driving and suddenly your car dies because the car company "banned" you and locked your car.
Something very similar has already been happening for years with cars.
Car dealerships and lease/loan companies install remote tracking and deactivation systems in vehicles they sell/lease, with the idea being that if you don't pay your loan/lease, well the car just won't run.
There's been a number of cases where this has been abused. For instance in Canada a dealership locked a car they no longer owned[1] because the owner refused to pay a removal fee for the device.
Tesla has been removing features from second-hand cars[2], which is definitely trending in that direction.
Your analogy works against this point. If you were to deprive me of my use of a vacuum cleaner, then a court would absolutely rule that you make me whole. Those damages could be 100x the original price if that valuation can be demonstrated.
The store is bound to the terms of the warranty contract, which usually comes with limitations or allows for discretion when deciding how they shall honor it. But that applies to defects, not deprivation.
The bigger the asset, the more it approaches the parents suggestion.
If a rich person buys an expensive asset and it is defective, they're often owed for loss of use/revenue because they have the power to negotiate purchasing contracts that provide this. Us poors do not have this capability.
The analogy here is if you buy a vacuum cleaner from a store and it doesn't work because of a defect. You bring it back and get your money back.
The store isn't required to provide you with another working vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum cleaner is no longer manufactured, they're not required to find one in mint condition on eBay that's 10x or 100x the price.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.