Cem Kaner
ABSTRACT
Software publishers and information service providers publish information about their own products and about other products and people. Additional content might be incidental, such as discussion of the practice of accounting in documentation of a bookkeeping program. Or it may relate to a publisher's product, such as papers on the nature of a disease at the Web site of a manufacturer of a device used to diagnose that disease. Other content is irrelevant to the product, such as political articles on a company's Web site. In all of these cases, the publisher's technical publications or quality control staff might wonder whether they should check accuracy and tone of this content that is not direct documentation of the product under development. This article considers a variety of potential legal grounds for holding publishers accountable for content errors.
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Index Terms
- Liability for defective content
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Reviews
Maria Bielikova
This paper focuses on a variety of potential legal grounds for holding software producers accountable for content errors. Examples from various fields of publishing are presented in order make observances related to software documentation, including Web sites that offer product information. The paper is organized according to key exceptions to the default rule of American law, which strongly protects the rights of authors and publishers to express themselves, even when they make mistakes. Kaner discusses the implications of false statements about the vendors' products, intentionally false statements, and false, defamatory statements. Other issues are related to the failings of products endorsed by content providers, and negligently false statements that result in personal injury or economic injury to a person who had a special relationship of trust with the author. In spite of the fact that the paper is based on American law, the author is aware of other law systems, and the issues discussed represent a good basis for further elaboration outside the United States context. The intended audience of the paper is content producers and software managers. The paper presents only a rough outline of issues related to liability for defective content of published material. It could well serve as a warning for software engineers who produce software systems documentation. Deep study (also considering a wealth of references to various cases) is also necessary. Online Computing Reviews Service
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