Liability for defective content

Software publishers and information service providers publish information about their own products and about other products and people. Additional content might be incidental, such as discussion of the practice of accounting in documentation of a bookkeeping program. Or it may relate to a publisher's product, such as papers on the nature of a disease at the Web site of a manufacturer of a device used to diagnose that disease. Other content is irrelevant to the product, such as political articles on a company's Web site. In all of these cases, the publisher's technical publications or quality control staff might wonder whether they should check accuracy and tone of this content that is not direct documentation of the product under development. This article considers a variety of potential legal grounds for holding publishers accountable for content errors.