Opinions wanted, everyones please... kinda long though.

So being in the technical support industry sometimes you have to tell someone no they can't have something. Most of the time this is set forth by policy. (Stuff in bold in this post is taken from email communication or from the article itself).

A friend of mine is under fire now because of the following article:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/2829.asp

The EULA and TOS that customers agree to each rental is very straight forward. The key points were listed by my roommate a former tech support employee of Movielink in an email to this person. It read as follows:

Excerpt taken from Movielink Terms of Use (publicly available by the way);

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO USE THE SERVICES ON ANY MOVIE WEBSITE, YOU MUST REVIEW AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS OF USE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THE MOVIELINK SERVICES. (Wow, in bold even!)

This one is from section 3;

Movielink charges a license fee each time you license the right to view Premium Content through the Service ("License Fee"). The License Fee price will be made available to you at the time of purchase.

Hey section 4b;

THE INITIAL LICENSE TO THE PREMIUM CONTENT IS LIMITED IN ITS TERM AND DURATION TO THIRTY (30) DAYS FROM ITS ORIGINAL DATE AND TIME OF DOWNLOAD OR TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOURS FROM THE START OF ITS INITIAL DISPLAY AND VIEWING, WHICHEVER OCCURS FIRST, UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED AS BEING LIMITED TO A SHORTER TERM AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE. IN SOME CASES, YOU MAY BE PERMITTED TO PURCHASE LICENSES FOR ONE OR MORE ADDITIONAL TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOUR VIEWING PERIODS FOR A PARTICULAR ITEM OF PREMIUM CONTENT.

This definitely applies to the complaint, section 8a;

These Terms of Use (and therefore your license granted herein) shall terminate automatically and immediately if you fail to comply with any of the limitations described in these Terms of Use.

When asked why he left the individuals name in the article by me his response was:

Granted, I could have changed the name of the operator. I didn't fault the
operator themselves. As see from the transcript, she was not rude in any
way, but simply stuck to the rules.

Yet from his own article above he states:

"This is a real conversation and the names have not been changed in order to expose yet another example of how traditional behemoths have yet to grasp the power of the Web..."

Let's return to the EULA/TOS arguement above from my roommates email. Want to see his response?

By letter of the law you are 100% correct.the terms are laid out and I can choose to abide by them or not. However, I assure you I am not the first and I won't be the last to be upset by the failure to allow customers a longer viewing period.



That's not really the point. What is the point is that the terms are flawed and are indicative of a traditional business (the studios) stumbling its way into a new world and stubbornly refusing to cede to a new way of doing business.

So he endangers my friend's job by signing up with us to push the limits of what he could get away with. Then write an article b******g that after he got one retention credit because the movies "weren't up to his standards" he wants another because after a month he flat out didn't watch the movies.

Can someone explain why people do this shit? Is he right to do it in your minds? Personally I see it as him eating half a bag of cookies, taking it back to the grocery store, and asking for a full refund.

Opinions?

People do stuff like that all the time. From having friends in retail and hearing stories, people will bring back stuff they've used the hell out of, and expect money back for some ridiculous reason. Usually they get it. The customer is always right. Although depending on the company, sometimes the customer is always wrong, unless they scream loud enough, in which case they're right again. The poor employee just has to try to guess which way it's going to go, because the employee is the one with the least leverage.

Mr. Jaffe is a moron.

While it would be a considerable improvement to the service to replace such restrictions, they seem to be put out there for you. I went to the movielink webpage and saw the 30 day and 2 hour restrictions UNDERLINED TWICE here: http://www.movielink.com/commerce/help/ELanding.jhtml?sid=s4

I really don't understand how he couldn't have been aware of those restrictions. If you don't like the restrictions, your only option is to find somewhere else to rent movies.

He paid to d/l a movie for 30 days and be able to watch it within that 30 days. He tried to get the rules bent and was denied.

The next logical step, of course, is to cry that the customer is always right, publish an article on the internet, and try to get whatever poor saps he interacted with fired.

Agreed.

He is a fucktard. He was wrong. The analogy of the half eaten bag of cookies was dead on.

If he wanted to b***h, b***h about the policy, not about the fact that the company enforced the policy.