Whatever "here" means to you. Sure they could sue her if they thought she was acting in bad faith, badmouthing their product or service. The problem is she was telling truth and she was sentenced to jail just because that is what Asus can afford to do with people in Peoples "Republic" of China.
In any other country she would be let go and spill the beans, what would they be afraid of - if she was lying? Well, she wasn't and she seems to be a stubborn little lady. Thumbs up for her!
Asus - a company with no focus, greedily chasing revenue at any cost, not respecting customers, reviewers, own employees or general public in any sense, a real behemoth and unwashed satan, pure and dirty evil with no dignity.
Do a google search for "Asus lied" before you open your mouth again to defend your holy Asus...
relax
and don't be rude to me please.
I will attempt to explain. I'm not being rude or 'smartass'. Just want to explain. I do not think Asus is innocent. Yes they are evil. I do like their products though. What they did and how the government of china handled it were morally wrong- however this girl and her 'lawyer' made an extreme legal mistake and did 'technically speaking' commit a crime (blackmail/extortion) although their intent may not have been malicious.
Anyways, Im in Canada if you wanted to know.
You don't understand what I'm getting at here. It's China who put this girl in Jail. Not Asus. Asus moved to prosecute this girl over her attempted blackmail and extortion, which is what she did. More on that in a second.
If this had happened in the United States, the girl likely would not have been jailed and would have instead received some variety of fine- however, Asus and pretty much any large company I know of, when faced with extortion, would have followed the same route automatically. that's how corporations work. They're all evil that way.
Now, here's what happened and I'll try to explain the legalities behind it. In the case of the definition of blackmail, that's essentially international, so this will be very straightforward:
1) This girl had a problem with her ASUS hardware, which she attempted to RMA several times. The problem recurred every time. Eventually when inspecting her hardware the girl realized ASUS had used, instead of a retail/oem CPU, an 'engineering sample' which they are not supposed to use in retail consumer equipment
>At this point, ASUS has commited the crime of fraud, by using a product in an illegal, and thus fraudulent application. This too, has pretty much universal definition, and would be the same in North America (US/Canada/Mexico)
2) She gets a lawyer. The correct thing to do here would have been to simply take the record of events and illegally RMA'd laptop as evidence and sue ASUS for fraud. That's all they had to do. Whether or not they'd win, I don't know. In China I doubt it. Regardless, this would have been a legal course of action.
Instead of this, they contacted ASUS privately and threatened to sue and publically release details of ASUS' fraudulent behaviour
unless ASUS settled for X amount of money.
That's blackmail/extortion. By definition.
You can not threaten "If you don't do this, I'll do this bad thing to you", in any country that I know of. It's not legal. It's blackmail.
At this point the girl has essentially painted herself into a corner, where her crime is now worse than the crime which was initially purpotrated against her (
Extortion/Blackmail > Fraud in most legal systems) and for some screwy reason which I don't understand, again, most legal systems will at this point disregard the original lesser crime and prosecute the greater crime- especially if the target of said prosecution
1) is an easier target with less defense capacity, such as a normal earning citizen
2) is not a corporate / governmental entity which financially or otherwise benefits the state
Now, the girl is reported by ASUS to chinese authorites prosecuted for extortion by those authorities. It is the Chinese legal system who put the girl in Jail, not ASUS-- though ASUS was likely aware given the Chinese legal system that this would happen- however their decision to sue in defense is the same knee jerk reaction that any corporate entity I know of would have had.
Is that fair? No. Its horrible, but that's how it works.
Was ASUS right? No. Was the girl right? Initially, but she screwed up.
The world is a big stupid game. Asus made a bad play. She made a WORSE play in response, and she lost- because she was the little guy in a world that does not look kindly upon the little guy
She is not the completely innocent individual that many of you would claim though. From a legal standpoint what she did was even worse than what Asus initially did to her.
ASUS= a big
evil company that makes really nice motherboards. I have one in my system. Its excellent.
