Originally published at: Legal Eagle discusses OceanGate's liability waiver | Boing Boing
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My understanding is that the company had very few actual assets other than that sub, along with one other that was less-capable and that no paying customer in their right mind would even consider going in these days. So the question isn’t really whether OceanGate would lose any lawsuits brought by the families of the deceased, but rather is there even a point in suing when the company is almost certainly going bankrupt either way? But maybe if the company had insurance (which isn’t clear) then there could be a way to get a little money out of them.
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Legitimate research group using tourism to fund their science!
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Seems to me that there’s no point in anyone suing anyone else here.
Hubris rather than greed at work here. Like the Real Engineering video says, don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Lawsuits can’t bring back the deceased paying passengers, er mission specialists, and the guilty party has already been sufficiently punished.
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Oceangate wasn’t a sole proprietorship. There was a team of people behind that death trap and they should be held accountable.
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I would be very interested to hear what insurance company would write them a policy. Because stunts like declaring paying passengers mission specialists who made a “donation” may be enough of a loophole to trick regulatory bodies for a short period of time, an insurance company can just not give them a policy.
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Good point. Have we heard from any of the employees with regard to the ‘move fast, kill customers’ culture at the company? Other than the one who raised a red flag and was fired and sued, of course.
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The CEO had a degree from Princeton and was a former Test Engineer for McDonnell Douglas, so he should have known better and likely bore more responsibility for this fiasco than any other individual. There definitely may be some other engineers at the company who signed off on a bad design and also hold some responsibility, but most of the lower-level workers who were just building things the way they were told shouldn’t have to face any liability, in my opinion. I’m a licensed engineer myself, and if I drew up a shitty design and signed off on it then the machinists and welders who were just building it per print shouldn’t be punished if it ended up killing someone due to design flaws.
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Waitaminit, OceanGate? They literally named themselves to look like a scandal? Like WaterGate, but more?
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… if somebody owes somebody money, and assets exist, lawsuits are how people sort it out 
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I know in the US it might, uh, hold water, but in most common law countries that waiver would barely be worth the paper it might have been written on.
The repeated pronouncements by arsehole in chief about how great they were, huckster huffing his own farts that he was, undermine it fatally. It can’t be both safe and unsafe.
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I was thinking more in terms of heavensGate…
(edit; dammit, that was actually a pun, wasnt it?)
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