FTC Says 'Warranty Void If Removed' Stickers Are BS

I think this has more to do with Apple telling customers they can't use legitimate repair shops, same with BMW trying to make folks use authorized dealers.

Great - so it's perfectly OK for totally unmqualified people to make inept, potentially dangerous, even deadly repairs to your own stuff with potentially substandard or simply wrong parts now.

What genius came up with that idea?

Nope. Speaking as a former service tech who has seen various equiipment mangled by ill-advised attempts at repair by unauthorized agents, I reiterate my previous statement, and furthertmore state that the magnuson-moss warranty act is an incredibly stupid and dangerous law that should be voided at the most expedient opportunity.

Let's look at it from an automotive perspective - should people have the right to have their brakes worked on by some unauthorized back yard mechanic and then when the car gets into a fatal accident have the manufacturer held liable under warranty? Hell no! Non-authorized work should void the warranty and the manufacturer MUST have the right to specify who does work on their equipment during the manufacturer's warranty period. It's for the safety of the consumer as well as the protection of the manufacturer. Incidentally, it was about 1975 when many manufacturers shortened their then-standard one year warranty to 90 days. Coincidence? I don't believe in coincidence.

Should manufacturers be required to repair something that has been mangled by some monkey? Because that's what the act says in stealing the company's right to enforce the terms of their own warranty.

And please don't go quoting Cory Doctorow at me - he is a well known agitator against the rights of creatives of all types, an advocate for piracy and theft, and general scummy influence on society. He can go stick it.

Who better than the manufacturer is to say what is a "legitimate repair shop"?

The reality these days is that there are very few real repair shops left in most industries - because modern manufacturing has increasingly leaned towards manufacturing techniques that cannot be easily or properly serviced without specialized equipment.

Even on what might appear to be a simple, do-it-yourself repair - replacing the battery in a mobile phone which has a non-user replaceable battery - do we really want people's phones blowing up in their pockets - which has happened - due to an improper replacement of a lithium battery? There's a REASON that many manufacturers have moved to non-user replaceable batteries and that's why - lawsuits from people who were seriously injured by exploding phone batteries.

Sometimes the bad repair is recognized too late - after the device undergoes catastrophic failure.

And as a tech if I see a bad repair, what do I do - refuse warranty repair on the unit? But the law says I can't do that. I might get sued in small claims.

The law doesn't prevent people from working on their own stuff - it just removes protection from authorized service people against having to clean up other's messes.

I have not seen damning evidence. I've not seen him argue that everyone should give everything away, but points out things that could endanger creative commons usage, when it could be the best application for public good.

I have to agree with John. I worked in a repair shop for many years, and I saw all kinds of botched repair jobs that were later claimed to be the fault of the company, or "it was like that when I bought it" types of claims. Many small claims court dates were made. Many times we had to pay for damage we didn't do, for people who knew that we'd have to pay.

We were forced to create a hostile warranty repair policy, taking copious pictures, notes, test results, etc to have defense against any claims from that point forward. Prices went up and we lost customers.

You might think it's few and far between, but I'd wager it was more like 30% of incoming warranty work was user negligence, then a botched repair, and then blaming us so they didn't get charged for the real repair, which often amounted to a lot more than the original repair would have cost.

What's going to prervent us? Well, evidently, the law. The law says we cannot declare the warranty void if the device has been tampered with, so by law we are bound to repairt it under warranty. If you're a warranty station you're bound to take in warranty repairs.


The law says that tampering is not reason to void the warranty. The whole reason for those stickers is to detect tampering. If a customer is aware of this misbegotten law he can make life holy hell for a small warranty authorized repair service.

Maybe things are a bit differtent now with these newfangled electronic communications, but when I was running the service departments in music stores we didn't have digital cameras and email. And such things didn't exist when the law was written, either.

you aren't declaring the warranty is void.  the company is.  You're just the repair guy following the directions of the Company who made the gear.  You don't work for the Roland, for example.  you work for John's Electronics Repair and are an authorized repair center for Roland.  And Roland said "We aren't going to cover that repair under warranty".  

Glad to see this.
I don't know if this was covered in this thread yet, but this started in the auto industry. The courts deemed it was unfair for a manufacturer to void the warranty on, say an A/C system, just because you modified the exhaust. It ensures that you aren't forced to take your car to the dealer to get your oil changed, etc.
I was wondering why it hadn't been applied to other industries sooner.
If you do something that can specifically be linked to damage of a specific part (for instance; if you change your speakers and it shorts out the electrical system in your car, frying it) the manufacturer is not required to to warranty those damaged parts.