There are many myths surrounding the liability of ICT companies and Tech Startups. Some of them are true, others not at all. We put 4 persistent myths under our microscope:
As a rule, many insurers exclude claims for infringement of intellectual property rights. For a patent or patent infringement, there is effectively no cover. The opposite is true for infringement of (software) copyrights. In terms of copyrights, unintentional infringements are perfectly insurable.
Every ICT policy on the market provides a standard exclusion for USA-related claims. However, with a number of insurers you can have this exclusion wholly or partly removed. A lot depends on the way you do business there: do you have a branch office there, do you work directly or via a distributor, etc. By the way, you don’t have to look that far: as soon as you have an establishment in the Netherlands, you already have to take into account the local employer’s liability.
Admittedly, when I first started studying IT insurance, I myself assumed that this was covered by traditional policies. Two years later, I know that insurers do not like result commitments at all and therefore do not like SLAs either. This is included in the policy conditions that we developed ourselves at Certibit, but all insurers provide an exclusion as standard. Something we always include in our insurance audits.
Know that legal aid as a supplement to professional liability insurance is always very limited in content. Contractual disputes with suppliers or customers, for example, are never insured. If you do need this, please contact us.
Covering your company optimally against damage claims is not a ‘walk in the park’. It also requires a lot from your insurer: understanding what you do exactly, understanding what your policy says about it and matching those two with tailor-made conditions. A 5th and very persistent myth is perhaps: “our insurance will be fine”. If you want to check this for your company, contact us for a free screening. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
