April Fools! (Toshiba to Sue Everyone Who Didn’t Buy HD DVD)
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008Toshiba, the chief backer of HD DVD, the loser in the high-def disc format wars, has announced what it calls a “reverse class-action” suit against every household that failed purchase an HD DVD player since the format launched in 2006. The lawsuit charges that, by failing to support HD DVD, their non-customers “handed the format war to Blu-ray on a silver platter and deprived future customer of their right to make a choice.”
Toshiba CEO Tadashi Okamura stated that the suit would target households with a high-defination television and which have a household income of $120,000 per year or higher. “Our lawyers felt that we had cut prices deep enough to sue everybody, but we didn’t want to seem greedy.” Following the example set the Recording Industry Association of America, Toshiba will be seeking $3,000 from every household in the United States that meets that threshold.
“I have a hard time believing that Toshiba would stoop to this level,” said Sony CEO Howard Stringer. “We knew they were losers but we couldn’t guess that they were such whiny bitches.”
Barry M. Meyer, Chairman and CEO of Warner Entertainment, whose decision to exclusively support Blu-ray tipped the format war in Sony’s favor, issued the following statement. “Everyone seems to think that we went Blu-ray exclusive because we were paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Sony. The truth is that we were just tired of putting up with Toshiba’s shit.”
