Nothing like a class action lawsuit to make companies pay for their bad behaviour, ‘eh?

If you purchased in the United States between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 from a retail store in the United States (including Creative’s and others’ on-line retail stores) a new Creative brand hard disc drive MP3 player (“Creative HDD MP3 Player”),

Well, that’s me. Read on…

In the suit, plaintiffs allege that in the sale and marketing of its hard disc drive MP3 players Creative stated that purchasers of the drives would receive approximately 7% more usable storage capacity than they actually received

Hard drive manufacturers do that all the time.

and misrepresented the number of songs and number of hours of music the players could hold

Hey now! If you like compressing your music to sound like it came through a 1930s era transistor radio then you’ll easily obtain the quoted capacity.

Creative has denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiffs’ claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation. The Court has not made a decision on the merits.

And yet, here they go compensating us. Justice at work.

if you submit a valid claim… a discount certificate good for 20% off the price of any single item purchased at www.us.creative.com.

20% off — Fantastic. So I go price out a nice 2GB Zen (a sweet MP3 player), and with shipping it’s only $19 over the cost of just buying it in a local store. Yay.

I believe that’s called justice!

(In Creative’s defense, despite the fact that I do agree they acted dishonestly, they did follow industry practice — Oh, and they’re not first the hard drive retailer to settle either)

If you happen to fall into this class, go to www.creativehddmp3settlement.com for info, if you grab a more expensive unit and qualify for free shipping, you might actually come out ahead on this one.