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| Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, October 05 2012 @ 03:47 AM EDT |
From this BBC News
report:After Argos withdrew its erroneous price-tag on the
Internet of £3 for a television set, buyers are furious and talk of compensation
- but do they have a point? The BBC's legal affairs correspondent, Joshua
Rozenberg, explains.
A shopkeeper has a television for sale. He
puts it in the window with a large sign advertising the price. A customer sees
it in the shop window and offers to buy it.
The shopkeeper does not
have to sell the television if he does not want to. At that stage there is no
contract.
The shopkeeper is making what lawyers call an 'invitation
to treat', an invitation to the customer to make him an offer.
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: "For a while the decimal point was in the wrong
place"
So the customer cannot insist on buying the television at the
advertised price. If the shopkeeper has put an unusually low price on it -
deliberately or by mistake - he can refuse to do a deal with the
customer.
Argos does not have to sell you a television for £3.
However, if the company accepts your order electronically then there
may be a valid contract.
A customer who gave Argos his credit card
number received what was called a Unique Order Code. That may be proof of a
contract, although Argos said all items were "subject to availability".
And it is also possible for the courts to declare a contract void if
the seller has made a genuine mistake.
The Consumer Protection Act of
1987 makes it a criminal offence to give consumers a misleading price
indication.
Shopkeepers in England and Wales can be fined up to £5000
in the magistrates' courts each time a consumer is misled. It's a defence for
the shopkeeper to show he acted diligently and took all reasonable steps to
avoid giving the consumer a misleading indication.
But a company
could not just claim it was a mistake: Argos would need to show it had reliable
systems in place designed to stop this sort of thing happening.
The
fact that Argos displayed its prices on the Internet should make no difference.
The Consumer Protection Act covers giving misleading price indications 'by any
means whatever'.
Local trading standards officers could take action
in the part of the country where Argos trades or where consumers happen to
live.
In my experience, Joshua Rozenberg is usually very careful
to give precise legal information. As I pointed out, previously, the action
against unfair trading action would be under the The Consumer Protection Act.
Apple and Microsoft would be wrong to claim that a patent licence for a global
company is covered by consumer protection legislation.
I would also
point out that it would be a contract between equals in the case of patents
included in standards. There can be no unfair contract terms on the basis of
unequal bargaining.---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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