I was pointing out that the law you pointed to specifically requires that "the person does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer". My comment was to h

I was pointing out that the law you pointed to specifically requires that "the person does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer". My comment was to highlight that discussion of "authorised" does not make sense, strongly suggesting the specific law you mentioned was not relevant. You give an example saying that I can't disclaim liability for software which deliberately causes damage. That may be true, but what law am I breaking? Can I distribute an "rm" tool which will let you do "rm -f /"? Can I disclaim damages for using that tool? I really hope so! Your "it gets installed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Who installed it? You? Why did you install it? Did you read the documentation to learn about any changes? What counts as sufficient notice for the potential of causing damage? But back to the chilling effect - if I did NOT deliberately put something in your software package intended to cause damage, but a company thinks I did, must I go through a lengthy and expensive lawsuit, or can I point to the lack of warranty, etc. and have the suit dropped? Because if I can't easily get the suit dropped, then a company can use the threat of a lawsuit to get me to make changes to the code, eg, to "fix" the code they think I maliciously added.