Comment by sofixa
2 years ago
> there any established case law on the matter
Always makes me laugh.
Anyways, not in the US where you're probably asking for, but yes, the vast majority of the developed word has that. It's called "false advertising", and exists at least in the EU, Australia, UK. You can't put a label on your product or advert that is false or misleading.
So if the box says this is a WiFi6E router, but it's actually only 5 because it's using the wrong components to save on costs, you can report them to the relevant authority and they'll be fined (and depending on the case and scenario you get compensation). The process is a harder bordering on the impossible if you bought from AliExpress from a random no name vendor though, but as long as the vendor or platform or store exists in the country with the sensible regulation you can report it.
That’s not really what the commenter was asking. That’d be false advertising in the US too.
I think the question is less “if they skip on parts and lie” and more along the lines of incompleteness. Like “it’s an HTTP server, but they saved on effort and implement put as post, which works fine for most of use cases”.
That said, I’d guess this would be a pretty hard case to win. The law typically requires intent when false advertising, so if they didn’t know they didn’t follow the spec they might be fine. And it depends on the claims and what the consumer can expect. Like, if you deliberately don’t say explain the exact spec your SSD complies with, and you make no explicit promises of compatibility, it’s a harder win. Like I bet few SSD manufacturers will say “Serial ATA v3.5 (may 2023) tested and compatible with OpenXFS commit XYZ on Debian Linux running kernel version 4.3.2”. But if they say “super fast SSD with a physical SATA cable socket”, then what really was false if it doesn’t support the full spec?