ahh yes sue everybody cause after all it is the American way

this case won't fly because you have to accept an agreement every time you update the firmware

in this case why harp on the guy and not SONY.We all know SONY has done some evil things to consumers.If I was this man I would be BS if I used a firmware and found it destroyed my PS3 and then the company said you have to pay to fix the fact that our firmware killed your console.
whatever................i do not own SONY.

that sounded like almost every other class action lawsuit i have seen - with the exception that it was more eloquent. i think sony will settle for $150...

Wow you need to learn something about the legal system. The acceptance agreement is not a blanket coverage for anything that can go wrong. They want you to think that but it is far from it. If Sony creates the problem they are COMPLETELY responsible for fixing it. Period. Otherwise every electronic manufacture could create a bad patch and charge you to fix it. That's what they are afraid of,creating a PRECEDENCE in which they PAY for the PROBLEM they CREATED. Sony is trying to avoid their own RROD moment.

This man did the right thing. The company screwed up his PS3 and they refused to fix it. If they simply repaired his PS3 at their cost they would not have been sued. Simple.

h

hey so far the EULA is working for apple and other software companies sure it gets challenged but nothing comes from it. why would he do this anyway he will still have to pay a lawyer big bucks to defend him. he will not get anything from this lawsuite but debt.

Firmware doesn't make your ps3 "fail." The hard-drive is probably corrupted, instead of going through all this mayhem, Kennedy could have simply avoided this by reformatting his HDD. If this issue was soley caused by Sony, why isn't everyone else's affected? Can you sue Sony for a simple error that even a computer can generate downloading new updates?

im guessing this kid is technically challenged then . and may be the reason why sony still wanted him to pay the 150 because its possible that they knew the firmware could not harm the hardware.

I'm guessing most you did not even read the link in the article or review the attached court document to that link.

"Thousands of Sony PlayStation 3 owners say they downloaded a mandatory software update that irreparably damaged their machines, causing the consoles to freeze and the controllers to stop working."

This firmware was not optional, the end-user had no choice but to allow the device to upgrade to 3.0. A week later the Optional 3.1 patch then made many of thier BRD Players stop working. How is this a fault of the end-user? I'm no lawyer and i don't own a PS3 but, I'm guessing this guy's class-action case can hold more than water in court IMHO.

good on 'em, as the should! I hate frivolous law suites, but this is perfectly justified. IF YOU ARE GOING TO IMPLEMENT AN UPDATE SYSTEM, MAKE SURE IT'S FLAWLESS! or have a failsafe switch!

Hi All,
** Fix for bricked Bluray drive below **

My 60GB PS3 worked fine after the 3.0 update but the very next day when I did the 3.01 update the BD drive packed up. It would not play any PS3 games, BD movies or PS2 games from the BD drive and the system would lockup if I attempted to. Audio CD's and PS1 game disks worked fine. PS3 Games on the HDD worked fine.I called Sony and they gave me the pay AU$250 bull. They also suggested formatting the HDD to see if it fixed the problem. I was sceptical, but I got a new HDD, formatted it and everything worked as before. I was however unable to backup the old HDD as the PS3 would throw an error saying unable to backup the drive. I therefore suspect that firmware 3.01 botched up something and corrupted the HDD.

If you have this problem do the following:
1) As HDD backup does not work, copy everything of value (Save games, music, PS1 saves, etc) to an external media. Do not copy game data and downloaded games. This is a tedious process if you have lot of stuff.
2) Format the PS3 HDD
3) Copy all your data back into the PS3 HDD
4) Download any purchased content again from the Playstation Store in 'My Downloads'

Thats it! Have fun. I don't support Sony for screwing up and then asking us to pay, but it seems like the update just corrupts your HDD and does no actual hardware damage. So if you want your PS3 up and running and cant be bothered to go through the hassle of suing Sony - try the fix above.

Cheers,

Rajiv

good on him i would not have the !@#$ to do what he did over a console, and its not like it can be fixed like you could with the 360's RROD (yes i fixed this it took half an hour) this was an error on sony's part that is potentially not recoverable. and for those who think that firmware does not make a device fail try to fix a bricked PSP... ironically also sony...

LMAO. It's a class action lawsuit. Why would he incur debt? The lawyer will take his cut out of the class settlement.

Good thing someone has the gumption to take Sony to task on this negligence and lack of consumer support. I have all three current gen consoles and Nintendo seems to be the only ones who haven't had huge problems--that I know of anyway.

I guess the question "ask what you can do for your country" is 'sue'. Sony deserves it, charging money for breaking a customer's product.

I think they should sue Sony for the motherboard failure of the early "Fat" PS3, which is the main cause for the "YLoD"

I don't know if the update kills the console or not, but I am glad that I was too lazy to do the update. Actually, I haven't even done the 3.0 update.
I personally don't think the guy is wrong in suing the SCEA. After a while, you start to get sick of expensive (at least for me) electronics failing right after the warranty expires. I hope SONY steps up, like VW did with their quirky DSG transmissions by extending the transmission warranty to 10yr/100k miles (of course, the bad thing being only certain VIN ranges fall under this). I'll get some popcorn, sit back and watch how it goes, that is, of course until my fat PS3 fails.

After reading some of the comments on how to fixed problem with a HDD reformat, Sony clearly have lousy support.

Its crazy that the user should be responsible for failures due to a mandatory firmware update, even without thousands of other cases. If Sony wants to force mandatory firmware update then they should be held responsible like PC users who want to flash their BIOS because there is always a risk with updating firmware/BIOS.

Dumb lawsuits piss everyone thats capable to think straight but I couldn't agree more with thi one. And I hope more do at the same time and crew Sony over for messing with the consumer this way and making a "lil" something extra through repairs like they always do with their hardware. Its not just PS relative but has always been like that when it comes to Sony. Id love to know how much money they have made from repairs and only and I'm sre you would all be. Ive bought way too many electronic devices from Sony and I might ave paid in total more for reparing their stuff than to actually buy them..

So, yeah, make them pay for me too please.

(p.s. Gaming related: yet they know how to make fun of the 360 which is free to send, repair and recieve for 3 good fat years. The ones laughing their ass off when they had never owned a 360 I bet they do feel kinda butthurt now, dont they? Well some ppl takes more than a bit to realise how things really are. )

Just buy this guy off with a couple grand and end of story.

Anyone else notice the emphasis on the sony store with v3 firmware? I log in I get some store dialogue or other, I change to the games menu and again the store?
I'm sure before the 3 update it just picked up from whatever menu I was in when I shut down, could be wrong however as I don't use it much tbh.

Well, so what shows that it wasn't a coincident? I mean if FW breaks the beast it's one thing, but if it just broke at the same time, why should it be repaired for free? Having in mind, that there are tens of million boxes out there, no wonder, some of them incidentally break right after firmware upgrade.

That it's happened to thousands of people? A coincidence is usually not very "wide-spread".

If this guy can sue Sony for "stopping working devices" after a FW. upgrade, I'll too! My PS3 gotta a linux inside, and I was able to access the RSX 2D/3D hardware acceleration with IronPeter's libps3rsx and, after 2.1 FW upgrade, it stop working!
Hell no! I want my RSX GPU access back!
Lets SUE Sony for this!

I waiting for the Class Action Lawsuit for the PSPGo system. If Sony had made this a new portable system that was different in terms of coding etc, then backward compatibility wouldn't be such a huge issue. But the fact of the matter is, the PSPGo is a PSP without a UMD slot.

Sony is not offering any compensation for people who have a library of PSP games. Also they are not giving anyone any reason to upgrade to a PSPGo.

You basically don't have much choice to upgrade the firmware on the PS3, I don't know how it is on the xbox or wii, but I expect pretty much the same.

Yes, you can say yes or no to the upgrade, but you won't be able to go online for certain stuff or play certain new games, so technically, you have no choice.

To charge the customer a fee because the console is broken because of the upgrade you are forced to install, that's just insane.

What's really odd about this is that it doesn't happen to everyone and those whom it does happen to are sometimes very sketchy in the details or reluctant to send their boxes in so that they can be investigated (without cost - that can be arranged through a supervisor as I've done so through personally). I currently have two PS3 units (an original launch unit and one of the other non-backwards compatible newer units) and both updated fine with no issues. I'm not networking or downloading a lot of stuff from the PlayStation store (patches and DLC mainly). My guess is that if the HDD is getting corrupted by the patch, it could be a severe write issue or the HDD is closer to full. Since most of Sony's patching is downloaded and then decompressed before installation, that could also be a reason why this happens.

In the view of this lawsuit, I'm not sure if it will go very far. Sony may just opt to exchange or replace all of the named plaintiffs on the suit with brand new units and make some mild change to their warranty policy (much like Microsoft did in the light of the RROD issues). If they are truly shrewd about this, they will then take the units they recover and check to see what all the affected units have in common with regards to updates, games played, downloaded DLC, etc. Since this is such a limited affect, my guess is that there would be a combination of obscure things that would draw this out but the more units they recover, the easier it would be to isolate.

As for firmware updates and upgrades, with all the new consoles, it is part and parcel of how things work. To that end, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all have a responsiblity to ensure that their hardware is functional at all times and should be much more amenable to exchanging or servicing hardware if they can physically determine that something based an update they've passed is the cause. That, I think, is the primary issue at root for a lot of people's arguments (and also that Sony has the audacity to introduce a new product to market which is non-inclusive).

I've never had the experience of hardware failing with Sony (I have with Microsoft and it was a pain to go through) and so I can't speak directly with any experiences with them. I did break the analog stick on my first PSP but even then, I had not issues with getting it repaired by them (and yes, I paid the fee).

sKiT75

BAM!

Any time you download something there's the potential for damage. This especially includes firmware for anything. Most likely it's just a coincidence that his PS3 failed at the time of that update. Considering he's the only one that's reported the problem I'm more likely to believe it's just a coincidence and not Sony's fault. We need more information and facts before we can start pointing the finger and blaming everyone for every little thing. It's amazing how fast our society is eroding into this "blame everyone but me" paradigm.

Considering there are only a few thousand and not millions of PS3 owners* is what I meant to say in the above post.

Yes on the Xbox in order to be able to use Xbox Live you need to take the updates, same with updates for games, unless they are a single player game like Oblivion.

I can see just taking the system and repairing it, problem solved.

Yeah right, it's a class action lawsuit which means lots of people are sueing. Which means $150 X Number of people sueing + lawyer fees = the least amount these people will settle for.

Seems to be a no win for this as all units would seem to need to be affected for it to be valid. Since they seem to be mostly all working but a few isolated issues, from all reports, maybe this is an unwarranted allegation that will just be dismissed. What technical experts are they going to find to prove anything? Circumstancial evidence is not likely going to hold up in the court if they have any sense. It should be easily defended by Sony.