5 ms·
Suppose I sell you an oil filter for your 2019 Mazda. When you get it home, you realize there's a big hole in it, and it can't be used to replace the one curre
by martincmartin 6y ago
Suppose I sell you an oil filter for your 2019 Mazda. When you get it home, you realize there's a big hole in it, and it can't be used to replace the one currently on your car.
You call me up and I say "I never said it would work in a car, I just said it was an oil filter (true) which would fit into a 2019 Mazda (true)."
The law says "nice try, you can't be that pedantic. The ordinary purpose of oil filters it to actually filter oil in a car, so when you sold it, there was an understanding that it would work for that purpose."
- fogof 6y agoWhat if the oil filter doesn't have a hole in it, but just has 10,000 miles on it so it doesn't work well anymore. Would selling that be ok? What about a filter with 9,000 miles, or 5,000 miles, or 1,000 miles? Who decides what the cutoff is?
- detaro 6y ago> Who decides what the cutoff is? ultimately, a judge.
- owenmarshall 6y agoThis is where technical people hit a wall with the law. Many legal systems, especially the American one, aren’t based on strict enumerable lists of what my lawyer friends would call “bright line tests”. This is probably a good thing, all in all.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThat's because the world is too complex and nuanced for such strict cutoffs to be stipulated in law. Just the number of products on the market is huge and changes all the time. The law therefore specifies things in general terms and uses 'reasonableness', or "fitness for purpose", or what would be expected by an "average bystander" (in English law), etc. in the same way this piece of legislation does. This allows courts and juries to then make a judgement on the infinite number of particular cases that get before them.
- danaliv 6y agoIndeed. And things don’t go to court if they’re obvious. The whole point of going to court is to resolve conflicts that don’t have obvious answers. (Or where the more powerful party is being stubbornly wrong, but that’s a separate issue.)
- travisjungroth 6y agoI have had this discussion (argument) with so many software engineers and pilots who think they found a loophole. If someone in power thinks you broke the law, you don’t have to explain yourself to a law interpreter. It’s a human being on the other side of that table. And they can be just as clever and capricious as you. Most bodies of law also have a catch-all (I like to call it “fuck you”) clause to cover whatever shenanigans you try that they haven’t yet enumerated. 14 CFR 91.13 comes to mind. Also, check out my new cryptocurrency that skirts all SEC laws. http://orangegrovecoin.com http://orangegrovecoin.com
- dataflow 6y agoYour example doesn't highlight something important about this though: they explicitly disclaim the "implied" warranty of merchantability in addition to disclaiming all warranties in general. In other words, that means that in your example, you hadn't merely declined to say it works in a car, but you had in fact already said "I guarantee NOTHING about this oil filter; it comes with absolutely NO WARRANTIES", and yet someone would've still called you up and said "despite all your disclaimers you still have an implied warranty because you didn't disclaim it explicitly"... which is far less obvious than what you wrote.