Creative has reportedly settled a class action suit brought against the company in California which alleges the consumer electronics maker misled customers with inaccurate capacity claims for its portable media players by inflating them as much as 7 percent.
Apparently, Creative calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB) - which is not at all uncommon - but failed to disclose this as well as take into account space taken up by the formatting structures and the software necessary for its devices to store, organize, and access stored data.
Anyone upset by this who can still find the receipt for their Creative player purchased between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 is eligible to receive a 50 percent discount on a new 1GB player or a 20 percent discount at the company's online store. As is customary with many of these class action lawsuits, the real beneficiaries seem to be the lawyers, who will collect $900,000 for their trouble, while the main plaintiffs will get $5,000 in monetary awards.