Jeff said:
IF and ONLY IF Joe tried the VueScan demo
I don't think so. Ed's disclaimers in respect of refunds are certainly
not sustainable under UK law, and I suspect EU and US law too, and would
fail in any court of law if challenged. Disclaimers, by law, are not
permitted to infringe a purchaser's statutory rights.
Under the Sale of Goods Act 1968 and subsequent updates, a product must
be fit for purpose (note that does not mean fault free) and it must
deliver the claims made for it by the manufacturer or supplier.
Suggesting "test before use" does not invalidate the obligations of the
vendor to deliver what is claimed.
Some of Ed's claims are very questionable in factual terms, for example:
"VueScan gives you improved color accuracy and color balance, increases
your productivity and saves you money"
It clearly doesn't deliver the first of these if it creates lines that
aren't present in the native scanner's software, consequently it also
fails to deliver the penultimate and final claims too.
The purchaser may well have tested the product and found it failed to
deliver the promises yet, believing the claims, paid for the full
version in the hope that it overcame the problems he had found. We all
know that certain features of Vuescan are not available to the
unregistered user, so full "testing" is simply impossible in any case.
No disclaimers or free testing of full or crippled modes infringe the
buyer's statutory right to a full refund if the product fails to deliver
the claims made for it.
Bart's example earlier in this thread, from Canon, is interesting. I
was one of the main UK protagonists against Epson when they had a
similar problem with their printers a few years previously, and it
really comes down to what was claimed for the product. When they
launched the 870/1270 printers, Epson claimed that their prints could be
handled just like ordinary store photos and would not fade for 27 years.
Like Canon users now find, these dye prints fade under certain
atmospheric conditions (free air movement across a high gloss micropore
print surface caused oxidation of the light cyan dye) in only a few
days.
After denying the problem existed, Epson were eventually forced to offer
to buy back all of the printers and refund all of the purchased
consumables worldwide to avoid major court cases in several countries.
The series of printers which had been sold with the generic "fading"
claims was withdrawn and a new, virtually identical series the
890/1280/1290, was released but with limited claims. Epson no longer
claim their prints can be handled like normal photos or refer to a
generic fade time. They invented a new term "lightfastness" - which
means the fading effect caused by light alone. Since the dye prints
were fading due to atmospheric oxidation (as are Canon's) this
effectively absolves Epson from that particular responsibility. One
good point is that this debacle encouraged Epson to switch to pigment
inks, and eventually resin encapsulated pigments rather than dye inks,
and now offer light fastness of over 100 years. They also have
extremely good atmospheric oxidation fastness, but Epson don't claim
that - once stung...
I don't know what claims Canon made for the printers, papers and inks
that Bart bought, but if they made the same mistake as Epson did then
the best recourse is to the small claims court to recover your personal
costs and, if enough users can get together, through a joint court
action - Canon would probably settle out of court as a cheaper
alternative to a full product recall, as Epson did. However, given the
publicity that the Epson debacle received, I would be surprised if Canon
had made such wide ranging claims for their product in the first place.
, I would love