Brussels / 4 & 5 February 2023

schedule

Windows and Office "tax" refund

Various cases about the refund of pre-installed software, and the right to install any software on any device


On 2018 Luca purchases a Lenovo Tablet/PC and, since it comes with Microsoft Windows pre-installed, he requested the refund to Lenovo, but Lenovo denied to refund Luca. A court case was initiated, and Lenovo was condemned to pay a punitive damages of 20000 euros for its abusive behaviour.

After this "historic" case, some other refund were request to other companies, such as HP, Dell, Microsoft, Acer, and again to Lenovo. Each OEM tried to deny the refund, with various reasons such as contractual clauses contained in the sale contract or in the same license agreement, or the need to delete the Product Key stored in the MSDM BIOS ACPI table and therefore they require to send the PC to their laboratories. These reasons have no valid legal basis, because – at least in Italy – the license agreement is a contract totally unrelated to the sale contract, so a third party may not impose any action on your material good, and the license agreement has remained without causal and economic justification, because not accepted and missed to be concluded.

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Photo of Luca Bonissi Luca Bonissi

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