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Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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It sounds like they literally can't refund people because the company completely ran out of money and is gonna be liquidated. Sucky situation for all parties involved.
If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.
Or a law stating that in the case fair refunds can not be provided that the software needed for running the hardware becomes public domain and is published and released on a git maintained by the library of Congress.
Yes please. And mandatory copy.
And who is going to pay for that? If they could afford to refund all their customers they wouldn't be going bust.
The law would probably make sure customers whose products are being bricked are counted as creditors. Ideally after employees (unpaid wages) and before investors. They may not get full refunds, but they'll be entitled to something if it's possible.
Liquidatoon doesn't mean they have no money. And they still have some assets.
Also that's why we should apply mandatory copy laws to software too.
Surely in that case they could open their software so the community can figure out what it would take to keep it running.
Their creditors would sue because thats an asset that can be sold to refund them.
Yeah, likely true without some sort of legislation.
Well at least there's a business opportunity for someone to reanimate these things and use them to push gacha games and energy drinks on the innocent children they've bonded with.
I think at this point they have far more important things to worry about than that.
What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there's a chance they don't own all of it.
I bet they can
Unless they don’t have the money in which case they can’t.