You are associate general counsel for the FixPoint Corporation, which makes consumer and enterprise networking equipment. You have recently become aware of an issue with your company’s WX11N series of home wireless routers. Once daily, each router connects to a “time server” to reset its internal clock. Each router ships with a list of roughly 100 different time servers. Each time they check what time it is, they pick a random server from the list. The goal is to spread the burden of checking what time it is across a large number of servers, so that none of them bears an excessive burden. Unfortunately, due to a bug in the WX11N’s software, the random-number generator always returns “16” when it picks which time server to consult. That means that the roughly three million WX11Ns in consumers’ homes are all querying the same time server at the University of Helsinki. Worse, due to another bug, they all do it at 2:00AM local time. This leads to a flood of hundreds of thousands of queries to the time server at the University of Helsinki, which has caused it to crash on multiple occasions. The University is threatening to file suit and possibly also to deactivate its time server entirely. Evaluate the legal risk the FixPoint Corporation faces. You have a meeting scheduled with the engineering team later today. Are there any questions you would want to, either to evaluate the legal risks or to consider possible mitigation strategies?
FixPoint may be liable for Trespass to Chattels. In Intel v. Hamidi, we saw that unwanted electronic communications may constitute a trespass to chattels if the volume and frequency of the communications is sufficient to overly burden the recipients’ email system. Here, we must determine if there was actual harm to the University’s system. It is likely the Courts would find some harms since the University experienced crashes on multiple occasions.
We need to ask the engineering team how soon they can remediate the issue. Can there be a manual override for the query? Can we assign the numbers instead of using a number generator?
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