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Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe we should have realistic expectations.

Craftsman owes me a torque wrench; they promised a lifetime warranty.

Except Craftsman is now dead. The lifetime of the company has expired.

Expecting otherwise is delusional. Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?

While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.

It's the stuff of horror stories when your ex takes "but you said you'd never leave me and you'd always love me forever" to its most literal extreme. The expectation is irrational and unreasonable.

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> Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?

The company that metaphoically changed its name but is still selling torque wrenches. Or the parent who bought two torque wrench companies and had the power to gracefully merge them together but instead cut them in half. They still inherit the contract after all

>It's the stuff of horror stories when your ex takes "but you said you'd never leave me and you'd always love me forever" to its most literal extreme.

sure but a SO isn't a company, who does indeed have a contractual agreement to "server you for X time". X time with many stipulations, but I guess lawyers will argue over that. They may be right in an absolute sense, but a judge definitely takes the power dynamic into account with cases like this.

> While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.

Can you actually shed contractual obligations through mergers/sales of a business?

Or do you need to do trickery like selectively buying assets, and hope a judge lets you get away with that?

Someone buys assets but not obligations. The obligations are attached to an organization, not to something that organization owns.

Also, bankruptcy causes anyone with such an obligation to stand in line with other creditors.

So why should it be possible to buy assets and not obligations then? Perhaps this should be illegal: if you want to buy another company, you get stuck with the whole kit n' kaboodle. If the obligations are toxic, then don't buy it.

We'd probably need a good regulatory body to investigate M&As though, to make sure some company doesn't split itself in half, with the good parts in one half and the bad parts in another, and then sell off the good part while letting the bad one fold.

> So why should it be possible to buy assets and not obligations then?

If the sale was at an honest, market price, what would be the problem? The seller is fairly compensated and can use the money received to service any obligation.

Bankruptcy has something called "clawback" where sales or payments by debtors within some time window before the declaration can potentially be "clawed back". There are defense against this, included the mentioned time limits. So one approach in splitting up a company is not leaving the debt burdened part too burdened, so it doesn't immediately fail.

There have been a bunch of clawback cases filed in the FTX crypto exchange bankruptcy.

IANAL and don't think it applies in this case, but I don't think you can pull that trick in an attempt of getting out of a debt at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance

> While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.

Letting companies discharge debts and obligations at will, instead of through bankruptcy, has bad consequences. It means contracts with them aren't worth the paper they're printed on, if they can shed obligations when they wish (but keep what you paid them).

I have to admit I’d love to go to a wedding with realistic vows. I’d imagine something like, “I promise to love and cherish you until such time as it becomes inconvenient or I get tired of you or whatever”.

A fairly realistic one, having various stats in mind: "I will love you for however long most humans can love a single other human without getting tired of them, which on average boils down to 15-20 years"

A bit more brutal one that happens quite a lot in more traditional countries: "I really want my relatives to leave me alone about marrying and having kids so here, I am marrying you as a ticket to another life that I'll abandon once I am reassured I won't be deprived of inheritance".

"I will love you for as long as peer pressure dictates." :D

Yep, that one is pretty valid as well.

"For better or worse, in sickness or in health, unless you turn out to be a total bitch."

This is a little more egregious than the usual attempts. It isn't Funimation being bought out and dropping old liability. It's Sony buying a new company and dropping its own liabilities by shutting down Funimation.

Letting companies drop contractual obligations through labelling shell games is not ideal.

Sorry is craftsman dead? Maybe they’ve changed but they seem alive and well - https://www.craftsman.com/

It's.. kinda complicated?

"Craftsman" was never a company. It was a trademark under which Sears sold tools which they hired various tool manufacturers to produce for them.

Black and Decker bought the trademark from Sears in 2017, but don't use the trademark themselves; instead, they licensed the name right back to Sears for 15 years for free (that license will expire in 2032), and Sears (now Sears/Kmart) is still using it the way they used to; getting tool manufacturers to produce tools for them and selling them to consumers under the Craftsman badge.

So it depends on how you want to look at it? Sears never actually made the tools themselves, and don't own the trademark any more, but they're still the ones using the trademark and they're still selling tools made in the same way as they did before. So.. nothing's really changed? Except that the ownership of the name has been transferred to a different company.

Craftsman is as dead as RCA. Those brands are now just trademarks, names sold to the highest bidder, not the company that built the quality products that the words now lead you into thinking they might still represent. At least "Craftsman" is still Stanley-Black&Decker, ...if indeed that means anything anymore. RCA is nothing: Sarnoff weeps from the beyond...

RCA? You mean like the speaker plug? /s

I wonder if there are other eponymous products which have similarly outlived the company that created them?

I haven't tried it yet but Lowes says they will replace Craftsman lifetime warranty tools originally purchased at Sears.

Unless the tool is absurdly priced, this is a great deal for Lowes.

You get good will for your brand, and a person who is very happy in your store at that moment.

Simply Brilliant.

>Craftsman owes me a torque wrench; they promised a lifetime warranty.

Did they? I have two Craftsman torque wrenches from the 1990s when they had lifetime warranties on tools, but as I remember, the torque wrenches were specifically exempted from this.

A better example would be a Craftsman socket wrench.

We can come back to that argument after Sony has died.

Yeah, expect Sony is alive and profitable, so your entire argument is bullshit.

It can honor the agreement, or it can die. We can and should make sure the latter happens if they choose not to do the former.

Learned helplessness does not need your advocacy.

This reminds me of (IIRC) Alianz Life, which decades ago issued a single policy that will over time bleed the company dry.

I think some European court denied their request to weasel out of it.

Sure, but in this case, maintaining the digital properties surely won't bleed Sony dry.

Letting people download the content DRM-free for a period of time while sunsetting the service wouldn't bleed them dry either.

It's not even a mistake Sony made (unlike Allianz or whichever firm it was), it was a deal that they decided to renege on after taking money simply because they can.

> Expecting otherwise is delusional. Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?

You can make a claim against their estate.

> While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.

Courts have generally seen things differently, except in cases of bankruptcy.

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