warranty disclaimer [LWN.net]

warranty disclaimer

Posted Nov 13, 2003 9:34 UTC (Thu) by hingo (subscriber, #14792)
In reply to: warranty disclaimer by ber
Parent article: An attempt to backdoor the kernel

Hashes aside, I see that Larry of BitMover has collided with The RMS of Europe. Ouch, didn't see that happening, especially since this is not slashdot. Anyway, too late now.

I completely agree with the above clarifications. In summary:

1. A warranty disclaimer in Europe is meaningless. You are responsible for some of your actions wether you want it or not. For Free Software (as in beer, even) a warranty disclaimer might even be an empty statement.

2. This was nothing new, however some rich and twisted people decided to make a fuzz about it. The headlines "GPL is invalid in Europe" were of course only humorous at best.

As for the coffee thing, if I spillt coffee on myself because I was "drinking and driving" and burned myself, I would not want to announce it to the world in a lawsuit that I'm that stupid. This is the difference with US citizens and the rest of the world. I have no need to defend McDonalds however.

henrik

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McDonald's coffee suit

Posted Nov 14, 2003 14:40 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Details of the case. Read before discussing. 'Nuff said.

warranty disclaimer

Posted Nov 14, 2003 21:56 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

1. A warranty disclaimer in Europe is meaningless. You are responsible for some of your actions wether you want it or not.

The second part, "You are responsible..." is also true in the US, and probably everywhere else. The first part, "A warranty disclaimer is meaningless" is not true in the US, and I kind of doubt it is anywhere else either.

In the US, I am responsible for my actions under laws that have nothing to do with warranty: tort law. However, I am responsible for additional things because I gave a someone a warranty. In some cases the law says I give that warranty implicitly, and in some of those cases, the law says I can override that implied warrantee by explicitly disclaiming it.

Here's where freely distributed software comes in: For some of those actions for which I am responsible under tort law, a person may assume the risk from me, in exchange for valuable compensation from me. So in return for my valuable software I may demand from you, instead of cash, indemnity against the risks inherent in distributing software (the risk that through some fault of mine, the software hurts you). Exactly how free we are to make that trade varies a lot from one jurisdiction to another.

And finally, most of the "disclaimers" we see all the time are not warranty disclaimers. They are merely notice that the person does not intend to assume a certain risk, and they serve to defeat ridiculous claims such as, "I would not have parked my car there except that the owner of the building led me to believe he would protect my car."