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Creative settles over MP3 player capacities

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

May 1, 2008, 4:10 PM

Creative becomes the second company behind Seagate to settle with consumers over exaggerated drive capacity.

Creative was accused of misrepresenting the number of files and hours of songs that players could hold, as well as inflating capacities by as much as seven percent.

While Seagate's settlements dealt with its hard drives, Creative's deals with its MP3 players. Any consumer who bought a player between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 is eligible to receive a settlement.

The terms of the deal call for Creative to "make certain disclosures regarding the storage capacity of its hard disc drive MP3 players," in addition to giving those affected the option to purchase a new 1GB player at 50 percent of the retail price, or receive 20 percent off a product at the company's store.

Consumers are eligible to file one claim per player purchased during that period, with no limit to the number of claims, according to the class-action notice. All claims need to be submitted by August 7.

As is customary with many of these settlements, "Creative has denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiffs' claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation" due to its actions.

Plaintiffs' attorneys are seeking $900,000 in attorney fees as well as $5,000 in monetary awards for the main plaintiffs.

Creative had no immediate comment on the settlement.

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By morriscox

posted May 2, 2008 - 6:55 PM

"Plaintiffs' attorneys are seeking $900,000 in attorney fees as well as $5,000 in monetary awards for the main plaintiffs."

Wonder if the plaintiffs will sue the attorneys over this.

Score: 0

By paps

posted May 2, 2008 - 11:50 PM

Sue the attorneys over what? Doing the the job they were hired to do? I think Beta News is partly to blame for the misinformation surrounding this settlement, but this perception that the lawyers didn't earn their fees is without merit.

First of all, the settlement needs to be approved. Second, the attorneys fees are CAPPED at $900,000, that's not the amount they are getting. Third, the $900,000 includes attorneys fees AND expenses.

So all the costs related to the case (mostly discovery) will be paid within that amount. What the attorneys themselves will receive is much less than that number. Clever wording of this article is meant to paint the attorneys in a negative light. Had they lost the case, there would be no publicity and the lawyers would end up without a penny of compensation for their work.

Finally, the $5,000 is for the two representative plaintiffs (Vibhu Talwar and Patrick Finkelstein) as compensation in addition to the settlement award for class members. The plaintiffs, who did nothing more than put their names on the complaint will receive $5,000 for merely complaining.

For more (first-hand) information, go here:
https://www.creativehddm...ettlement_Agreement.pdf

Score: 0

By roj

edited May 2, 2008 - 10:53 AM

Why is ANYONE suprized at Creative Labs duplicity today?

Those of us who have been dealing with computers and DAPs for any length of time exceeding one year know one immutable law of nature:

Creative Labs Builds Crap Products.

I won't buy CL garbage with YOUR money.

'nuff said.

Score: 0

By seier

posted May 3, 2008 - 11:38 PM

Hi Roj,

Creative Labs may not make the cream of the crop for the recording inustry, but they've always focussed on gaming and entertainment. Their soundblaster series of sound cards have had better drivers than any other sound manufacturer for a long, long time. Not only that you could buy a sound card from say 1990 and use it on an operating system from 1999, again, because creative supports their products. At the time I bought my MP3 player the only one you could buy that was flash-based from Apple was a shuffle. My Creative Labs Muvo TX FM, had 1GB of storage (a lot for the time), took AAA batteries (that's right I didn't have to spend 20 bucks each if I wanted more than rechargeable), it didn't require a special cable to attach to a computer, it came with both a belt clip and an armband, it could do FM radio and record both voice, and FM radio, at the time apple simply couldn't touch that feature set. The only problem is today, creative labs can't either, they quit making the Muvo TX FM line, much to my disappointment. Still the idea that they make crap products is nonsense. I'm not saying they make the best products, but almost everyone would agree they make pretty darn good ones.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

Score: 0

By davinp

edited May 2, 2008 - 11:22 AM

Roj,
Creative DOES NOT build crap products. It was Creative Labs who invented the iPod interface and their ZEN players are better than the iPod. The ZENs are better quality because they aren't made in China and last longer. The ZENs have features not available on the iPod. The Zen Vision:M has won several awards. Currently they are working on an X-Fi/W-Fi player

Previously, Creative was best known for their Sound Blaster sound cards, so their ZEN players have good quality sound

Score: 0

By ricegf

edited May 2, 2008 - 7:51 AM

So for my "injury" I get to spend more money, the person who sued over his "injury" gets $5000, and the lawyers get... $900000.

Who won this lawsuit?

Score: 0

By God Dammit

posted May 2, 2008 - 5:07 AM

These people have way too much time on their hands to file frivolous lawsuits over things like a very minor reduction in hard disk space due to formatting and slight differences in calculations used to determine storage capacity. The people who filed this lawsuit and the one against Seagate need to get a life.

Score: 0

By seier

posted May 2, 2008 - 1:16 AM

Hi Gang,

Can someone post the URL for class action lawsuit this article isn't that helpful unless I can get compensated.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

Score: 0

By Hollywood__

posted May 1, 2008 - 10:23 PM

Like the 80GB iPod with 72GB of actual space? I hate my iPods more and more every day.

Score: 0

By arossetti

posted May 1, 2008 - 7:38 PM

Oh please. Exaggerated capacity my rear. Each and every article I see about this just makes me more and more upset. It's all about the lawyers. End of story.

Score: 0

By GS5

posted May 1, 2008 - 9:04 PM

Personally I still get pissed off anytime I buy a HD of a certain capacity just to have 10%+ less space when the damn thing is formatted.

Score: 0

By seier

edited May 2, 2008 - 1:18 AM

Hi GS5,

What you need to understand is that if you bought a 1000 GB hard drive ~70 GB will be required for the file allocation table. However, that's only with NTFS. If you format that drive using FAT32, RiserFS, EXT2 or some other file system that 70 GB of "unusuable" space could be a bigger or smaller number. What does remain constant is that the drive itself can physically store 1000 GB of bits, not 1000 GB of usuable data, because that requires a directory (file system) and that too will take up some space. That being said an MP3 player should have an asterisk on it saying only 970 MB are usuable or something like that. An MP3 player should state that because the file system is known, which is not the case with a hard drive.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

Score: 0

By jbaumann

edited May 2, 2008 - 5:45 AM

No, the problem is simply that hard drive manufacturers (and companies using those hard drives in their products) use the not-used-by-anybody-in-real-life definition of "1GB=1000000000 bytes" (not even Windows itself uses it), while everybody else expects "1GB=1073741824 bytes", as would be logical to expect when dealing with a hardware which "thinks" in binary. So when somebody buys a hard disk which says "500GB", he will get - even though correct when using SI units nobody cares about in real life - about 34GB less than he expects to get (_before_ formatting, even less after formatting). There's a reason nobody uses that artifical definition of GB, reality does not fit to it. Just think of memory sticks, where so far nobody (not even advertising) uses the SI units. Simply because the memory sticks always come in these 2^x sizes, for technical reasons, and so each ad for a computer with 4GB memory would have to state "computer with 4.294967296 GB of RAM". Initially, some hard drive manufacturers opted for the 1GB=1000000000 bytes" thing because it made their hard drives look bigger than they actually were, but by now all hard drive manufacturers have jumped onto the bandwagon, so the advantage is gone and they might just as well use the more suitable for real life numbers again.

Score: 0

By testman

edited May 2, 2008 - 5:01 AM

That's not the main reason though. The big discrepancies is due to how companies calculate the meaning of 1K, 1MB, 1GB, etc. For example, they tend to advertise the size using the calculation that 1000 bytes = 1K, 1000K = 1MB, 1000MB = 1GB, etc. when computers calculate it using base 2 calculations - 1024 bytes = 1K, 1024K = 1MB, 1024MB = 1GB. This is why, for example, you get DVD sizes advertised as 4.7GB when your PC/Mac shows it as 4.37GB. Both are right, depending on which calculation you use and has very little to do with file system overheads.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/...ytes#Consumer_confusion for more details.

Score: 0

By God Dammit

posted May 2, 2008 - 5:11 AM

To make things worse, some older DVD burning applications (especially Roxio's Easy CD/DVD Creator) incorrectly state that it's possible to store 4.7GB of data on a single layer DVD and give mysterious insufficient disc space errors when you go to burn your data compilation to disc.

Score: 0

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