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Originally Posted by Kakyou
Guys, guys, guys!
Hold on there. This thread is totally starting to slide into murky waters.
Be very clear. This has very little to do with "the law"
First of all. If you purchased the iLiad with a credit card, non-delivery is not really between you and the seller anymore. It's between you and your credit card company and between your credit card company and the seller. Basically, the CC company has your money, the seller has the cc companys money. So if you want your money back, you go to you cc company. Then they go back to the seller.
Second, no one said Irex broke any laws (at least I didn't). At worst, they may be in violation with agreements that they made with Visa/Mastercard/etc in order to accept credit card payments.
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Hmm, hope I didn't suggest iRex broke any laws - in fact credit card laws in the US probably differ by state. In general, the practice here is that credit cards aren't billed until shipment (although a company may block an amount equal to the order when the order is placed). But equating the general practice is probably more of a competitive than legal issue.
Companies that have a 'presence' in another country, however, must comply with local law (regardless of whether a third country likes or agrees with that policy).
To take some heat off, I'll cite some recent examples. In the US, Yahoo and Google have been castigated in the press and 'reviewed' (whatever that means) by government authorities because they 'caved in' to the Chinese to meet local laws regarding the control of information flow. In much of the world, China is seen as an antagonist of free speech and made front page news in many newspapers.
But it seems to me that AOL got far less bad publicity over limiting certain WWII and fringe political group information (I'll be discrete, I'm not certain where mobileread servers are housed) and they made that information inaccessable from that country after authorities raided their local offices and tossed some executives in jail. In much of the world, the country taking action is seen as a democratic, western society with free speech. And in most newspapers this information, if reported at all, was buried in the middle of the paper or well into the business section.
I would argue that both events are limitations on free speech, but the companies with global operations needed to meet local laws if they wanted executives to stay out of jail and to keep operating in that country.
Companies inadvertantly break laws because all coutries, states or provinces, and cities, have complex legal systems (how else would they keep all those lawyers employed). Good companies do as much as they can to avoid problems in advance, and correct these errors when they are discovered. I don't see any issue with iRex that is anything other than inexperience (and a bunch of hyper geeks that want their shipment yesterday).