EU brings product liability rules in line with digital age and circular economy
Today [2024-10-10] the Council adopted a directive to update the EU’s civil liability law. The new liability rules better take into account that nowadays many products have digital features and that the economy is becoming increasingly circular.
Wait what? This looks BIG!
Yeah, I’m assuming developers in the big software companies are donning lifejackets due to the amount of palm sweat from the C-suites.
I only develop simple internal tools but I imagine this means either lots of new developer jobs or cutting down the scope of software a lot.
But if you think that’s bad, just imagine how AI companies feel like. Ahahaha.
Indeed, Poul-Henning Kamp of bikeshed and BSD fame got a nice little discussion thread started yesterday over on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/113317528662477344
Given other comments in this thread and the reactions I’ve seen on mastodon, people are freaking out, but I just don’t understand why. Can someone more intelligent please take the time to ELI5?
My understanding is that this would allow for lawsuits along the lines of “Your poorly written software caused [our business to lose this giant contract|thousands of consumers left with bricked devices|my washing machine to eat my dog]. Now pay up!”
Essentially, software vendors (vendor being the operative word here) would become liable for damage caused by their faulty products, just like manufacturers of air compressors or toys or fireworks.
IANAL nor intelligent, but after skimming the text of the directive I felt like the definition of damage is very limited. In particular, if I understand correctly:
our business to lose this giant contract
would not be covered by this directive, this directive is only about a human being hurt in some way,
thousands of consumers left with bricked devices
would be covered in case of “your game installs a kernel-level anticheat and the anticheat breaks PCs”, but not in the case of “you uploaded an upgrade to a firmware of the washing machine you produced and it bricked the machines”; the directive is not about a product breaking, but about the product breaking your health, other property or data,
my washing machine to eat my dog
is basically the exact case this directive covers.
Thank you for the corrections, I think I maybe skimmed the text back when it went through the EP, so I was mostly going from (poor) memory.
That sounds like a good thing.
I must admit that I can’t think of any examples of this ever being a problem though. It might also be because I’m just so used to crappy software breaking things that I’ve just come to accept it as normal
As long as they dont use it to pass liabilities to foss developers.
Nobody bears responsibility outside commercial activity because why would they? They’re not selling anything and this is about being liable for stuff you sell, like literally everything else.
