Way back in 2007 lawyers gathered together a group of gamers angry with Microsoft over scratched Xbox 360 discs to form a class action lawsuit. Nine years later the US Supreme Court is preparing to hear Microsoft’s plea to have the case dismissed for a second time.
Along with the infamous red ring of death, the early version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console also had an issue with scratching up game discs to the point that they were unreadable. Microsoft was aware of an issue that would cause discs to be scratched if the console was moved while the disc were spinning, with plenty of warnings not to do just that included on the system and online. Still many users claimed their discs were scratched up for no reason.
In a post from 2007 we detailed the origin of the class action lawsuit brought against Microsoft, but that was so many publishing platforms ago that the article is lost. In a post I wrote some seven years back, Microsoft stated that less than one per cent of Xbox 360 owners had scratching issues.
According to an AP report released on Friday (via Polygon), a US federal judge dismissed the class action suit in 2012, stating there were not enough complaints to justify a class action suit. Shortly after the dismissal was reversed by a federal appeals court.
And so this past Friday the Supreme Court of the United States of America agreed that they would hear Microsoft’s last attempt to shake the class action lawsuit. The company wants to argue that since individual claims from defendants in the class action had been thrown out previously, the group claim should as well.
The US Supreme Court will rule over whether or not Microsoft has to face the class action suit. Should their decision come back in the plaintiffs’ favour, we’ll check back in another five years or so to see how it’s going.
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12 responses to “US Supreme Court To Hear Microsoft’s Appeal Of Xbox 360 Disc Scratching Lawsuit”
Microsoft WAS hilariously dismissive of the rate of the RROD, which later turned out to be a design/materials flaw.
But I suspect the disc scratching is actually just people being stupid, unless these 360s still exist and the problem is repeatable.
If you watch an interview with all the bosses of the Xbox division the one att the time responsible saw the problem early on and then straight asked Steve Balmer to right off nearly 1.5 billion in stock, returns, and shipping of goods.
It was a hardware flaw but they did try to make amends.
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My 360 scratched one of my discs…forget which one but I’d only had the game for 2-3 days. Took it back to the store, claimed it came like that and they game me a new one.
Only happened once, my 360 was one of the later versions too where they’d supposedly replaced faulty components like the one that caused the red ring.
Of all of my Xbox360’s (yes I said ‘s cause I went through 3 of them), 2 had RROD and my last one is still kicking (and Xbox Slim model), the very first Xbox360 scratched disks to an extent I returned about 2-3 games to Ebgames at the time for replacements (cause I bought scratch insurance)
Looks like it paid off for you.
Scratch insurance always seems like a scam to me. Just take care of your games. If mine is not in the console, it’s in the case. Always.
the scratch insurance was when I was young and fell for it lol. Many times I would sell my old games and people were like ‘are these new cause they were in such good condition’.
Also good is you got housemates and have your console in a communal area.
I rarely buy my games from eb but when I do I always try to not shoot them a look of utter contempt when they offer insurance…but it is hard to refrain.
What a time to be alive.
People were moving their consoles.
It would be pretty easy for gamers to show that the disc scratches up without moving, I mean just record the disc in the console without moving it.
TBO I wouldn’t be surprised if some consoles simply scratched the discs, the x360 consoles had allot of faults, ps3 also.
PS. I use to repair the buggers…
I’m glad the 360 messed up in a lot of places. If it wasn’t for that, there’d be no Install-To-HDD function introduced later on to mitigate disc scratching and general overheating.