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The Noose Around NOVA's Neck Tightens Just a Bit More
I stumbled upon an interesting nugget concerning NOVA's recent legal troubles. If you read this article on Nikkei BP Net [in Japanese], as a result of NOVA's loss in the Supreme Court, METI has tightened its interpretation of the Specific Commercial Transaction Law and is now not even allowing a "rational" reason to recalculate service costs when providing a refund.
Not only has NOVA lost in the Supreme Court, but METI has made extra sure that consumers can't be ripped off when canceling a contract. I don't know how this affects NOVA, but it's certainly not a good thing for them. METI's administrative order can be found here [PDF and Japanese legalese].
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Thanks for the link! I'll be sure to read it after I comment, which means I'll probably say something that's already in the article. Anyway, I remember a bit back there being something in the press (Japanese or English?) about Nova claiming that METI officials had given the green light to their refund policy, which I thought odd, since it seemed like such an obvious farce, unless what the Nova spokesperson really meant was, "We had our return policy approved by the Ministry. Then we 'updated' it a bit. But, it still has the same title as the one approved by the Ministry! So what's the problem?"
Ken, You're right. The early
Ken,
You're right. The early articles in the newspapers mentioned that NOVA thought it had the tacit agreement of METI. However, AFAIK that's all the coverage it got and the press never expanded upon it.
The February 16th Mainichi Shimbun put it this way:
Who knows what NOVA and METI talked about or agreed upon, but my guess is that METI could not ignore the thousands of complaints about NOVA's refund policy and had to do something.
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
-Albert Einstein
Shawn