Creative hard-disk player owners – claim your discount!
Anyone who has bought a Creative MP3 player that uses a hard disk over the past seven years is entitled to a discount on a replacement product. That is the outcome of a lawsuit settlement Creative has agreed to, which affects all qualifying products sold to customers in the U.S.
The lawsuit was brought about because it was deemed that the storage capacity quoted on Creative’s hard drive products was misleading. That is because, like a lot of other hardware manufacturers, they use base 10 notation rather than base 2 notation to calculate the size.
There are two discounts available to customers. The first is 50% off the cost of a new 1GB mp3 player and the second is 20% off any Creative product purchased at www.us.creative.com. By accepting the claim you are also agreeing not to sue the company over the misleading storage size of your original product.
Read more at PC Pro and the Creative settlement information website
Matthew’s Opinion
If you own one of the qualifying products and don’t mind owning Creative gadgets again then you should be taking advantage of this. The 50% off a 1GB player is pretty pointless unless you either have a very small music collection, need a player for sports, or as a “my first MP3 player” for a child. The 20% off anything option is therefore the claim I expect most people to choose.
Unfortunately for other hardware vendors that ship products with hard drives, the settlement by Creative sets a precedent. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see other lawsuits start to appear for other companies. We also can’t forget the Creative lawsuit was only brought about in the U.S. but they are a company operating globally so could face the same action in other countries around the world.
This likely isn’t going to cost Creative a huge amount of money other than lost profit on the products discounted. Other manufacturers, such as hard drive vendors, may not be so lucky and Seagate has already offered a 5% rebate due to a similar action. With profit margins already squeezed a settlement like this would mean they are offering discounts that push products below cost and there would be significantly more products to claim against I suspect.
Tags: wireless, DAB, cellphone, MP3
