Don't be so quick to click that Web page

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Webmasters will soon have a legal problem!

I was just discussing this with legal last week (case related) and the consensus is that visitors to a WEB site clearly have a reasonable expectation of safety. Although this hasn't really been tested in the courtroom yet, it's fairly clear that a well chosen, properly prepared and presented case will succeed.

Should an infection occur and there is financial loss, it's likely the hosting site will be paying up. It's only too obvious that there are many considerations here, location, jurisdiction, provable negligence and so on, but it's also quite clear that many law firms are intent on aggressively developing Tort expertise in Web liability as an extension to their business line. They all see it as an nearly untapped revenue producer.



True enough, it's a venue fraught with problems in determining whether an infection related loss is recoverable or not, national and state borders, the hosting firms location, size, the server location, you name it, but for all of that, there are going to be some pretty big settlements soon. This alone will force hosting sites to take notice and action.

And to make it even worse, there's a new breed of trolls out there now looking for company hosted sites that are infected and vulnerable to an action.

I happened to run across one of those trolls who uses a virtual machine without any protection and goes fishing on big name sites and you can bet he's going to find something to build a case on.

Most companies won't be fighting it either, settlements are way cheaper than a long fight in the courtroom, but even a small settlement can kill a small company.

As an SysAdmin I'm not looking forward to what's coming, it's enough just to get the site up running clean and tight without having to police it for pollution as well, but we're going to have to do just that, and very soon or be job hunting when our company gets sued out of existence!.

AFH

Posted by: afhavemann@...   Posted on: 07/12/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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