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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

Absolute lol, I never trust those lifetime price locks unless it's enforceable by contract.

I think that's the point. Advertising anything as such should be the contract. It's unambiguous to everyone except the person who's paid to be confused.

Stuff of the form

Claim A*

* Actually not A

Should be illegal. Someone buying a product isn't a lawyer and shouldn't need one. Fine print in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that don't encode a persons reasonable expectation of the purchase agreement should be thrown out and labeled deceptive advertising.

> Stuff of the form

> Claim A*

> * Actually not A

> Should be illegal.

Sounds simple in theory, but not so simple in practice? You can't possibly encode all the legitimate exclusions into a big banner you can advertise, and nobody wants to read an essay to figure out the common case. You'd need to draw the line somewhere and I'm not sure that's an easy boundary to delineate.

I don't trust them regardless. AFAIK, they're effectively voided by bankruptcy.

So a company can profit from such claims, and then ultimately go bankrupt to protect those already-dispersed profits.

(IANAL, so I'm probably missing some major caveats.)

I would be fine with a company I've bought a "lifetime" service contract from went bankrupt and I lost it that way. That at least makes sense to a consumer and is something they should be able to figure out from a company advertising a negative revenue product. "Lifetime" of the company is fine to me, and is a fine way to judge the value of a "lifetime" product; How likely is this company to still exist in ten years?

This is the reason I don't buy Nebula's $300 lifetime plan. I want the company to succeed and still be here in ten years, so I don't want to take that offer and contribute to their bankruptcy.

This was enforceable by contract...

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