Protect Your Right to Sue Over the Y2K Problem

• Find your House Representative
• Find Your Senators
• Email Bill Clinton at president@whitehouse.gov

You are probably aware of the Year 2000 Problem, in which a simple but widespread software bug is threatening to disrupt computers around the world.

You may not be aware that the Congress of the United States is working on laws to deprive you of your right to sue those companies who brought this problem on us and have refused to fix it. I want to tell you what you can do to protect your rights and stop this attempt at shielding irresponsible businesses from cleaning up the messes they made.

The problem is a simple one, but far reaching in its effect - it has long been common practice among programmers to represent the year in a date as two digits; thus this year is "99".

The problem is that next year will be represented as "00", and may be interpreted by many computers as "1900", or just may make computers cease to function.

Dates are used so frequently in computers for business purposes, for operating machinery - including life-critical systems like airplanes and power plants - that it is expected a tremendous number of computer systems will fail.

This problem is not a new one. I first learned of it in 1980 when I studied COBOL as a college student; two-year dates were built into the language.

Programmers have been warning their managers about the problem for years, but the problem is expensive to fix. Many large databases have fixed-length fields for storing dates, and often the source code to business programs was lost or was unable to be rebuilt.

But many executives "got religion" as Y2K approached and business systems began to fail. For example, inventory systems would warn that materials were expired because the expiration date was 00 or 01 - and thus thought that the materials were nearly 100 years old.

Now the problem is well known, and many companies are working to fix it. But the problem cannot be completely fixed in time. There will be substantial disruptions and economic loss as a result, and there may even be loss of life when critical systems fail.

The companies that fail to fix their systems, and provide the fixes to their customers in time, must be properly punished. The way you do that is to sue them in court. This is likely to be the single biggest issue in lawsuits in history. For that reason, many technology and information systems companies are heavily lobbying the House and Senate to forbid these lawsuits.

The US Department of Justice opposes these laws because it will limit the ability of Federal, state and local governments to sue companies that sold them defective products or fail to provide critical services because of defective software.

If you lose your savings because a business failed to act responsibility - if you lose your job, or someone close to you dies, don't you want to be able to sue?

Please help stop these bills from becoming law.

What you can do: