First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not happened yet.
Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda. You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very interesting in finding out its terms.
As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty that is actually worth something.
It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games. This was not a day one feature.
The Court held that the first sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured outside of the United States, and the protections and exceptions offered by the Copyright Act to works "lawfully made under this title" is not limited by geography. Rather, it applies to all copies legally made anywhere, not just in the United States, in accordance with U.S. copyright law. So, wherever a copy of a book is first made and sold, it can be resold in the U.S. without permission from the publisher.
I made this because I feel there’s some interesting questions and implications this raises specifically because it’s going after unauthorised sellers who market their goods as new.
I specifically did not try to answer all the questions I’ve raised because for most of them I don’t have a definitive answer, or possibly even what it should be. I’m interested to see discussion on these points though!
It is a good point. There are a few industries where companies tend to be really strict about who you buy from and will refuse to honor warranty from unautorized sellers (headphones, other than the least expensive, are one that I came across recently). Many others require some kind of proof of purchase and I would guess most people realize that if you get something on ebay there is a good chance that the manufacturer will not honor the warranty. Sometimes this is just due to time limiting considerations (if something has a year warranty and you buy it and sell it unopened a year later should the person who buys it get a year warranty?) and sometimes the company wants to limit the warranty to the first person who buys it.
IMO, warranty needs to be considered independent of if an item is new or not and any company who has a problem with how Amazon is representing that should go after Amazon and not random third party sellers. I would also strongly support companies being required to either honor warranty on items that are resold new or specify a warranty period independent of when or where it is bought that is listed on the product. Many companies do everything they can to make sure the warranty sounds great when you buy while making every excuse to not honor it later. "Authorized Sellers" are just one part of that.
I think the biggest question you missed is "does a warranty count as a warranty if the manufacturer doesn't actually tell you about it". A previous thread on the topic noted that the game and its marketing materials don't actually mention any kind of warranty anywhere.
This may be related to Bethesda transitioning to distributing its PC games directly via Bethesda.net and cutting out middlemen such as Steam. They want to capture the full price of a retail copy, and to do that they are cutting out resellers on all platforms to drive people towards their own new platform.
Comments
I have two questions.
First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not happened yet.
Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda. You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very interesting in finding out its terms.
As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty that is actually worth something.
It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games. This was not a day one feature.
I think the warranty covers factory defects on the physical disc, i.e. if the disc is unreadable they send you a working copy.
Isn’t this trivially mooted by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So.... ?
The Court held that the first sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured outside of the United States, and the protections and exceptions offered by the Copyright Act to works "lawfully made under this title" is not limited by geography. Rather, it applies to all copies legally made anywhere, not just in the United States, in accordance with U.S. copyright law. So, wherever a copy of a book is first made and sold, it can be resold in the U.S. without permission from the publisher.
There was some decent discussion about that earlier on HN [1].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739631
Archive link if needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.megan...
(My website may not survive the HN hug of death).
—-
I made this because I feel there’s some interesting questions and implications this raises specifically because it’s going after unauthorised sellers who market their goods as new.
I specifically did not try to answer all the questions I’ve raised because for most of them I don’t have a definitive answer, or possibly even what it should be. I’m interested to see discussion on these points though!
It is a good point. There are a few industries where companies tend to be really strict about who you buy from and will refuse to honor warranty from unautorized sellers (headphones, other than the least expensive, are one that I came across recently). Many others require some kind of proof of purchase and I would guess most people realize that if you get something on ebay there is a good chance that the manufacturer will not honor the warranty. Sometimes this is just due to time limiting considerations (if something has a year warranty and you buy it and sell it unopened a year later should the person who buys it get a year warranty?) and sometimes the company wants to limit the warranty to the first person who buys it.
IMO, warranty needs to be considered independent of if an item is new or not and any company who has a problem with how Amazon is representing that should go after Amazon and not random third party sellers. I would also strongly support companies being required to either honor warranty on items that are resold new or specify a warranty period independent of when or where it is bought that is listed on the product. Many companies do everything they can to make sure the warranty sounds great when you buy while making every excuse to not honor it later. "Authorized Sellers" are just one part of that.
I think the biggest question you missed is "does a warranty count as a warranty if the manufacturer doesn't actually tell you about it". A previous thread on the topic noted that the game and its marketing materials don't actually mention any kind of warranty anywhere.
This may be related to Bethesda transitioning to distributing its PC games directly via Bethesda.net and cutting out middlemen such as Steam. They want to capture the full price of a retail copy, and to do that they are cutting out resellers on all platforms to drive people towards their own new platform.
https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-steam/