1998 PDT A group of high-tech heavyweights has come out in support of a California state Assembly bill that would exempt them from paying punitive damages in lawsuits connected to Year 2000 glitches, as long as they made a good faith effort to fix the problems ahead of time.
Lawyers view it as a wide open field for predatory class-action litigation.
Our view is that our money should be spent on programmers to fix the problem rather than on attorneys. The bill, up for a judiciary committee vote today, has the backing of the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Bankers Association, and the American Electronics Association, a group made up of more than 3,000 companies including Intel, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. In addition to predicted computer crashes, there also have been some predictions of bodily injuries if computers in equipment from elevators to airplanes fail to read dates and times properly. The new assembly bill was not designed to limit liability in those potential cases. Assemblyman Brooks Firestone, a Republican, said his bill would not prevent companies from collecting actual damages from business lost because of a Y2K error.