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UK Court Finds Company Liable For Software Defects
normsky writes "A software company's stipulation that it couldn't be held accountable for the poor performance of its software was unfair and could not be enforced, the High Court has said. 'Pursuant to the Sale of Goods Act 1979, a term is to be implied into the contract that Entirety would be fit for the purpose for which it was bought, namely that the system would increase revenue and occupancy levels and would allow quicker check-in and check-out, including accurately processing groups and making changes to group reservations while preserving the accuracy of the system. I am satisfied that Entirety was not fit for the purpose for which it was sold,' his Honor Judge Toulmin wrote."
Not really. If you're doing something for free, many laws don't come into play. For example, this is about the "Sales of Goods Act". If you're not selling, you don't have to worry.
Accountability for software sold is a good thing. Because right now, there is none.
I imagine you'd only be liable if you actually sell your product to someone, for money, promising them that it'll do something for them. If you just whacked a GPL programme on a website with a label "here is my programme, may or may not work, YMMV", I doubt you could be held accountable for what anyone does with it.
The crux of the court case, if I read it rightly, is that in the UK you aren't allowed to promise your product can do things that you know it can't do and then sell it to someone on that basis. That's standard- what the court case tested is whether putting "(but it probably can't)" in the small print is enough to get you around that. Turns out its not.
That's a good thing.
They are most informative, for those above crying about imaginary worries that this decision causes liability which did not exist before for free / OSS developers. It doesn't make even things harder for commercial developers, provided they're not a bunch of conniving idiots.
Here's the crux, on which the claim relies and the defense fails . .
in para 66 Toulmin finds: "*Red Sky's advertising materials for Entirety make specific claims for Entirety*. They include, among its other advantages, that Entirety "dramatically increases revenue and occupancy levels, allows quicker check in and check out service to paying guests. "This is the essence of the service Red Sky was claiming to provide for Kingsway. "
But the real fun is to read how Red Sky's case collapsed . .
some choice quotes from the findings, no particular oder, edited for brevity:
"Mr Benson was ill prepared when he came to give evidence. . . He said in his CV that he had been employed for seven years immediately preceeding his employment at Kingsway. This turned out to be untrue. . . His witness statements gave the impression that he was responsible for IT contracts . . In oral evidence he had to admit that, on the contrary, he was employed by Ramesys as a technical installer . ."
"Mr Edwards was at all material times the Managing Director of Red Sky. He said in oral evidence that he understood the business side but not the actual detail as to how the software was used. "
"Ms Howard found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the Action on behalf of her superiors . . " (they left it to their junior to defend the court proceedings against them! Wow!)
"Reverting to Ms Howard, there appeared to be times when she was covering loyally for the inadequacies of Mr Frost, to whom she reported, and others at Red Sky. Her witness statements contained important and glaring inaccuracies."
so in summary, the vendor lied outragously both about their product capability (not thinking to find some choice disclaimer either in their ad - copy nor in other material representations to the original sale which might have gotten them off the hook) and stumbled into court still telling a pack of lies.
FOR THOSE NOT CONVINCED THAT THIS IS OTHER THAN BUSINESS AS USUAL, PLEASE SHOW ME WHERE IN TFF (the f findings of fact)THERE IS A INTERPRETATION OF LAW AS TO THE EXTENT OF WARRANTY WHICH REVISISE PREVIOUS LAW???!!!
Frankly, it's just an silly workaday case, short in findings, and frankly rather fun to read.
Says plenty about the journalists who highlighted this that they could write more words than obviously they cared to scan - read even from the source.
As to the case itself, meh, nothing to see here, but gotta feel sorry for Ms Howard.
Or very very happy if you're her employment attorney, depending how you look at it . .
Imagine if a car or a washing machine came with an agreement like that
I had a hybrid version: an automated car wash at a petrol station did serious damage to my car after it collided with it.
The immediate reaction from the staff on site was to deny everything, point at some weasel words on a sign full of disclaimers, and claim that my car wasn't suitable for their machine (even though they could see it when they sold me the token to put in the machine, and it had been through the same machine without incident on several previous occasions).
However, when it reached their central "customer care" people at head office, they immediately arranged to pay out a substantial sum of money to cover the cost of repairs on a reasonable basis (asked me to provide two quotes from reputable local repair shops).
I later discovered that there had previously been at least one similar case that had gone to court, where the car wash operators pretty much got torn a new one. I imagine the "customer care" people were aware of this, or at least their legal team was.
So much for "good enough" software
On the contrary, it seems this ruling says precisely that software must be good enough. Unless there's something in the actual ruling that is completely missing from TFA, this doesn't require all sold software to be perfect or bug-free, just that it be fit for purpose and of merchantable quality.
That probably means that the more you pay for software and the more the advertising promises, the better the quality and functionality would need to be. A cute graphics demo that cost £1 on an app store for your mobile phone would not be expected to do the same things and with the same reliability as medical device control software you sold to a hospital at £100,000 per unit.
That's kind of the point of why this is an interesting / important story. Everyone has those kinds of statements in the EULA, and this judge has ruled that if you're selling a product to do X, it better actually be capable of doing X because no amount of weasel-words gets you out of the fact that you sold someone a product that would do X.
I read this on the Register yesterday. The /. headline is wrong. The court *didn't* find the company liable for software defects, they found them liable for misselling the product; the customer relied on the claims made by the company and those claims were wrong. The software was not capable of doing the job the customer needed, but the company claimed that it was.