Just something I’m curious about as I can totally imagine it happening in the real world.
Let’s say that Healthcorp is a medical services provider of some kind, and as such are required to keep certain records for a certain amount of time. They sign a contract with Archivetopia to keep safe all the records that they absolutely have to hold onto. However, the guy that used to work at GitLab got hired for Archivetopia, and he accidentally deletes a ton of entries from their database, which included Healcorp’s records, and there is no way to recover any of it. Then, Healthcorp gets subpoena’d, so they call up Archivetopia only to find out they can’t produce the records they need.
Who is liable in this case?
Unless Healthcorp can be shown to have contributed to the loss of data, I would think Archivetopia will take the full blame. For example, if they knew Archivetopia was prone to losing data and had a good chance of losing their data then perhaps they could also share in the liability.
That makes the most sense to me. I imagine if Healthcorp were found liable, or even had a hint that they might be liable, they would turn around and sue Archivetopia (or execute whatever penalty clause they had already agreed to, assuming it covered all related damages.)
Thank you!