Feds: Your Magnet Sets Are Lawful, Melt Them Down Anyway

In 2012 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) launched a barrage of legal and enforcement actions seeking to ban sales of tiny rare‐​earth magnet sets, popular under various names as a desk amusement with artistic and scientific applications. While the sets do not cause injury when used as intended by adults, they can cause serious harm to children when swallowed, so a key question was whether they may be sold for adult use with appropriate warnings against letting them into kids’ hands. As we noted at the time, the leading maker of the sets, which sold them under the name Buckyballs, launched an unusual public campaign criticizing the logic of the ban being sought, even though “it’s rare for a regulated company to mount open and disrespectful resistance to a federal regulatory agency,” let alone in sarcastic Internet memes. The CPSC responded directly and some would say vindictively with an unprecedented recall action naming Buckyballs co‐​founder personally as well as his company. After expensive ventures in legal defense, Zucker agreed to exit the business, leaving only one leading maker to bid defiance to the commission, Zen Magnets. 


While the CPSC pursued recalls and jawboned retailers to drop the product, the centerpiece of its campaign was to enact a ban on the product itself. Last year, however, the Tenth Circuit struck down the ban, ruling that the commission had improperly stacked its cost‐​benefit analysis. (Then‐​Tenth Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch concurred in throwing out the ban.) The commission has gone back to the drawing board, and perhaps at some future date it will justify a ban to courts’ satisfaction, but for now the products are lawful to sell, and in fact are being sold. 


None of which, however, has undone the effects of the various allied enforcement actions the CPSC took in its campaign. In one of those actions, a federal judge agreed with the commission that Zen Magnets had improperly ignored a CPSC recall order and ordered it to destroy the remainder of its relevant stock — even though that stock was indistinguishable from other magnets that are sold lawfully. 


The company recently held a “funeral” for the sets it was forced to destroy, $40,000 worth, with a slightly pointed “eulogy” read aloud by company operations director Eric Sigurdson. You can watch it here: 

More at the Denver Post and, on newer developments on the magnet issue at the CPSC, from former commissioner Nancy Nord.