[mythtv-users] Fwd: Further Notice of Seagate Hard Drive Class Action and Proposed Settlement

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/12/2010 12:16 PM, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Friday 12 March 2010 09:56:04 am Travis Tabbal wrote:
>    
>> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Brian Wood wrote:
>>      
>>> Just in case anyone missed this.
>>>
>>> WOW! Free backup and recovery software. Be still my heart :-)
>>>        
>> And again the lawyers get loads of money while customers get nothing of
>> worth. I shouldn't be surprised. At least with the Deathstars I got $100
>>   out of it, so they bought me a new drive. They should at least be required
>>   to swap out the defective drives with new ones or something like that.
>>      
> Not only does the software cost them nothing (they probably get paid for
> including it with drives in a "teaser" version, IOW "CrapWare"), but it's
> probably some sort of service that requires monthly payments, thus generating
> additional revenue. What sort of a "punishment" is that? This will only
> encourage others to produce "defective" products that will generate additional
> revenue.
>
> The cash offering is ridiculously small.
>
> Sort of like the giant settlement announced today for the WTC workers, the
> lawyers will get 33% of the total, the doctors and hospitals about 60%, so
> that leaves pennies for the actual victims.
>    

It's almost like Seagate did nothing at all wrong--you know when they 
told us they sold us a 500GB hard drive and they sold us a 500GB hard 
drive!  (The nerve!)

Then Microsoft told some clueless lawyers that the drive only had 466GiB 
of space available, but /also/ used the abbreviation for gigabytes (GB), 
/not/ gibibytes (GiB), so they thought that someone lied (and, we all 
know MS would never lie or get anything wrong, so it /must/ be the HDD 
vendor).  IMHO, MS should foot the bill for this one.

http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Info/Units/binary.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Besides, it's how hard drives have /always/ been sold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Hard_disk_drives

Another option would be to disbar all the lawyers involved in suing.

IMHO, none of us deserve the software, even.  (I bought plenty of 
Seagate hard drives during the period, but I'm not participating in the 
class action suit.  I just wish the postcards had an option besides, "I 
want to participate" and "I don't want to participate so I can sue them 
myself"--one like, "I believe this lawsuit is frivolous and wrong and 
should not make class action and the lawyers proposing the suit should 
foot the bill for all the costs so far.")

But that's just my opinion.

Mike