A recent Court of Appeal case may be good authority for saying that website disclaimers can be effective.
A husband and wife wanted a swimming pool in their garden. They searched the Swimming Pool & Allied Trade Association ("SPATA") website (http://www.spata.co.uk/) in order to find a contractor. The website explained that contractors listed were approved member companies who were fully vetted. Having found their details on SPATA, the claimants engaged Crown Pools Ltd ("Crown") to do the work. However, the work was not completed due to Crown becoming insolvent. The couple alleged that they had suffered financial loss and bought proceedings against SPATA on the basis that Crown was not in fact a full member of SPATA and SPATA had made negligent misstatements on their website to this effect, which the claimants had relied upon.
SPATA successfully argued that they had urged visitors to the site to seek further information as to the members, ie by obtaining an information pack (which had the Claimants done, they would have discovered that Crown was not a full member). This guidance appeared on the home page of SPATA and the list of members was sited very near to the wording mentioned above, namely that 'SPATA supplies an information pack and members lists which gives details of suitably qualified and approved installers in the customer's area'. The court held that the fact that visiters were directed to obtain an information pack meant that it was not liable where a visiter relied on wording on the website without seeking the information pack. Therefore, the Court of Appeal held that SPATA did not owe a duty of care to the couple.
The verdict will surely be welcomed as it is one of the first to consider the issue of website disclaimers. I note that the judge specifically states that the fact that the list of members appeared on a website did not make any difference and that no special considerations apply to representations on websites. However, the fact that in this case a mistake on a website did not necessarily lead the website provider to be liable, means that this could represent good news for website operators who, up until now, have had little guidance or inkling as to the enforceability of their website disclaimers. The case did not, unfortunately, give a steer on where a disclaimer must be found for it to be able to be enforced against a visitor, but no doubt it was relevant that the wording in this case relied upon by the website operator was very close to the representation in question.
do you think this will pave the way for more judgements of this kind?
Posted by: Road Accident Solicitor | November 30, 2009 at 05:17 PM