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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.
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.