People were buying Chinese inverters meant for the Chinese market off aliexpress on the gray market and shipping them to other countries. Deye decided to crack down on the behavior.
There’s nothing indicating this has anything to do with sol-Ark at this point other than them being the approved distributor of rebranded deye inverters in the US.
Sol-Ark’s markup is like 5x the list price just for the official rebadged version. Sol-Arks (“US veteran owned company”) still have the firmware made in China, and are susceptible to Chinese hackers, and had to be bought through a distributor. So naturally people went with off-listed Deye inverters because of the scheningans from Sol-Ark.
Now, people are without power and they have to go to Sol-Ark to get power restored, likely by paying through the nose.
That's one way to frame it. Another is Sol-ark incurs costs of developing, marketing and supporting their official devices and the contract manufacturer is able to sell their own version in the Chinese market. Greedy people who don't want to pay Sol-ark for all the costs they incurred bought grey market devices that Sol-ark has repeatedly warned are in contract violation in this market. The manufacturer, not Sol-ark, has now bricked those devices, and people are blaming Sol-ark anyway because they want to continue to justify their actions.
If the people are buying directly from manufacturer, why should any costs that Sol-ark has incurred be their concern? They aren't using the official devices, so they aren't enjoying any advantages of that, either.
So, companies like the free market when it suits them, but want regional monopolies (without providing any value) when it benefits the consumer. Interesting.
It does make one wonder why these exclusivity agreements exist.
If Sol-Ark is adding value and competitive differentiation, wouldn't that justify the price premium over the basic Deye product? Especially if Deye is not willing to offer its own support/warranty to customers?
Why does Sol-Ark need to create a more monopolistic landscape? Not being judgemental, genuinely curious. (Well, I know why Sol-Ark wants it. I guess the question is why we allow it).
Because those costs were incurred with the plan to recoup the cost from sales in the US, and (presumably) those people are bypassing the licensed sale/use; which ruins that plan.
Your question is really no different than asking why it's not legal for me photocopy books and ignore copyright.
The problem is they already took the money and basically broke it after the fact. Typically there’s all sorts of legal protections protecting against something like that.
Why should we as a society enable plans and business models that hinge on taking away consumer freedom to get the product from the most competitive supplier instead of the one who wants to milk an artificial monopoly?
It was my understanding that the company they bought it from didn't have the rights to sell it in the US. As such, there's no real difference between buying from them and buying from someone that stole it and sold it to you.
Now, you can argue that country-specific licenses shouldn't be allowed; but they currently are.
I think most people can see the obvious ethical difference between actually stealing something vs breaking an exploitative license like that, and react accordingly.
Unfortunately, it is an accurate and necessary term. Because while you might think that you are free to buy and resell anything you want without problem, the courts have made the issue much more grey than black and white. see the Omega v Costco lawsuit for an example.
My experience with this class of Chinese manufactured inverters are that they all use TI TMS320F28xxx series DSPs and usually without any protection fuses burnt. If you look hard enough you should also be able to find unencrypted firmware and flash it with the standard TI tooling.
USA is a free market. Everyone is authorized all the time to sell every safe product. The terms "gray market" and "authorized reseller" are linguistic manipulations which benefit manufacturers at the expense of everyone else in society.
I think Daye broke US law when they destroyed law-fully purchased products inside USA. I hope the inverter owners bring a class-action lawsuit against Daye in the US. The court could block the sale of the company's products in USA until they restore the inverters and pay restitution.
That’s laughably wrong. Exclusive distribution rights are probably enforced more strictly in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. They are governed by contract law. In addition, many product categories need to be demonstrated as safe to the right licensing agencies before being sold, not after.
> That’s laughably wrong. Exclusive distribution rights are probably enforced more strictly in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. They are governed by contract law.
But that’s an issue between the manufacturer and the distributors which can then sue each other for breach of contract, right? The “authorized reseller” thing shouldn’t matter to the end consumer, as soon as I have the product, it’s as legitimate as every other purchase.
I agree that it should be worked out between the manufacturer and distributor. But the idea that "it’s as legitimate as every other purchase" is flawed.
Let's say a guy in China buys the product from Deye, who stipulates under Chinese law that this is only for use in China and not authorized for export. The guy sells it on to you in the US anyway (so let's call him a "scammer" for violating law and misrepresenting the product to you, and innocent consumer looking for a good deal).
Why should Deye respect your rights at all and not brick the device? What rights should you have under Chinese law? If they don't brick the device, how can they disincentivize the scammers at scale? Sure you can say they should prosecute and rely on the deterrent aspect of the penal system, but that is not really going to be effective.
Basically it boils down to what rights the victims of scammers and criminals have. If you unknowingly bought stolen diamonds, what rights do you have when the original owner comes knocking?
The analogy to theft is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say it was a textbook that also had a label saying it was only to be sold in India. Would the US publisher have a right to steal such a book from someone in the U.S. that had it?
That first sale has to be legal for the subsequent resales to be legal. Plus we’re not talking about (domestic) resales here, the topic at hand is questionable imports of products never intended for sale in the U.S. off Aliexpress.
> U.S. Supreme Court Holds that Books Printed and Sold Abroad May Be Freely Resold in the U.S. Because the Copyrights Are Exhausted Under the First-Sale Doctrine
Now do sale of region-free DVD players in the U.S.
In any case, it’s perfectly legal for me to make and sell a geo-locked device in another country, and it is the importer’s problem if fails to work elsewhere. That doesn’t tend to happen with physical books, obviously.
Post-sale disabling of inverter devices is different than lack of support. The Supreme Court case on textbooks arose from profits on textbook arbitrage. New device-related caselaw will depend on a plaintiff that makes enough from device arbitrage to fund a lawsuit.
> The contracts we sign with all dealers clearly stipulate that products that are not UL certified and listed by local power grid companies may not be sold or used in the United States, because the products do not meet US UL standards. If used in violation of this policy, the devices may pose significant-safety risks. To address this, Deye has built a verification mechanism into the devices. The pop-up alert is automatically triggered by the device’s authorization verification mechanism, rather than by any human intervention.
Yeah, which is garbage. UL is a certification body, not a legal requirement. Your insurance might want it, your utility might want it.
But there's plenty of ways to use solar inverters where neither of those factors applies.
And furthermore, you can buy tons of non-UL-certified junk at Harbor Freight and plug it in yourself. It's not like there's a magic forcefield at the border that these Deye units somehow slipped through. Using that as an explanation for disabling their hardware is so insubstantial as to be just this side of an outright lie.
And I'm astonished that the linked article isn't calling them out on it.
When the local building code requires that grid-connected devices are UL listed, then it becomes a legal requirement. I suspect this is probably the case in most jurisdictions across the US.
edit: NEC section 110.2 indicates all equipment must be "approved" and delegates this to the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) locally; and the majority of them are going to defer to a "NRTL" (Nominally Recognized Testing Laboratory, such as UL, CSA, ETL, etc) instead of doing all the expensive and tedious testing themselves. So when it comes to grid connections, some sort of approval is nearly always a de facto legal requirement.
Mobile installations (RV’s, construction trailers, etc.) and off grid are two very common types of installations for solar inverters. And do not have to meet those requirements.
There are _many_ ways that all of this doesn't apply. Nevermind the fact that people that but things have the expectation of using the device with out interference.
Let's assume there are some people using these devices in a way that is not compliant with the local codes, because they haven't met the testing/certification requirements.
Genuine question. Which of these options do we prefer? (Choose any number)
1. Deye proactively bricks all the devices
2. US governments compel Deye to brick the devices
3. Local authorities penalize people using the devices illegally
If something actually burns down, authorities will circulate a bulletin and move to #3.
Anyone using the hardware in an off-grid, mobile, or other situation where the cited regulations don't apply, should sue the crap out of #1 and I will contribute to a gofundme for their legal battering ram.
Different countries have different laws and requirements around grid-connected inverters, mostly so people working on the grid don't get electrocuted when a stray inverter keeps feeding in power.
People were buying Chinese inverters meant for the Chinese market off aliexpress on the gray market and shipping them to other countries. Deye decided to crack down on the behavior.
There’s nothing indicating this has anything to do with sol-Ark at this point other than them being the approved distributor of rebranded deye inverters in the US.