Chris said
>I'm currently OCRing a lot of articles, and I'm a little concerned
>about legal liability for any mistakes that creep in. We proofread
>carefully, but from my previous experience as a journalist, I know that
>not all mistakes get spotted, even with 3 people double-checking
>everything at every stage!
>
>If an error appears in an OCRed article, are we legally responsible and
>could we be sued by the author and/or publisher? I raised this question
>at a recent seminar and got a variety of replies.
Yes, you get a lot of replies when you ask whether you can be liable for
making mistakes when publishing. But there*s only one answer: YES! The
relevant area of law is negligence - lawyerspeak for causing trouble to
people by being careless. There are two main things to bear in mind about
negligence. The first is that to be liable you have to fall below a
*reasonable standard of care*. The second is that someone has to prove that
they have sustained real damage (physical or financial) before they can sue
you. So if you made a minor OCRing error in rendering an article on
Aristotle in electronic form - putting *from* instead of *form* for example,
you don*t need to worry about liability: (a) because the aggrieved author
or publisher would find it difficult to argue plausibly that you had fallen
below a reasonable standard of care; and (b) because they would find it
impossible to argue they had suffered financial damage as a result.
However, if you made a real pig*s ear of OCRing and were clearly careless,
you might be liable because the author or publisher could argue that you had
done real harm to their reputation which might have financial consequences.
Context matters too. If you are supplying information which people are
likely to use to make really important decisions then the standard of care
has to be higher. In an American case, Greenmoss Builders v Dun &
Broadstreet, D&B were found liable because they told Greenmoss*s bankers
mistakenly that they were bankrupt. The bank refused an overdraft and
Greenmoss did then go bankrupt! Similarly there was a European case in
which a publisher was nearly held liable for putting the decimal point in
the wrong place in a medical textbook in a section dealing with making up a
saline solution. This mistake led to catastrophic consequences. The
publishers only got off because they successfully argued that the doctor
using the textbook ought to have been aware of the error.
So: yes you could be liable for OCRing errors, but only if you have been
careless and only if someone has sustained damage as a result of your
carelessness.
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