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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

That's doubtful. If the Girl Scouts started cracking down on cookie resellers, I doubt people would side with the resellers.

With the reselling of groceries you run in to quality control issues, where Pirate Joe's can be selling expired Trader Joe's goods and making people sick, which can make Trader Joe's liable for harm.

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It's possible that someone might try to hold Trader Joe's liable for the actions of an unaffiliated reseller. I see no legal basis for considering that they would succeed in doing so - even under strict liability, demonstrating that modification of the product was the proximate cause of harm is usually a sufficient defense.

I imagine that spoilage in the hands of an unaffiliated reseller would be considered such a modification, but perhaps you're aware of some precedent that I am not?

>With the reselling of groceries you run in to quality control issues, where Pirate Joe's can be selling expired Trader Joe's goods and making people sick, which can make Trader Joe's liable for harm.

Is there any precedence for that? I would love to see a court that put the manufacturer of a product at fault for damage caused by an unauthorized reseller. That would be no different than someone suing a food manufacturer because a grocery store sold their product after it had expired.

If you notice in the article, he already needs to create new nutrition labels for all the food to comply with Canadian law. He is clearly already liable for what he's selling, I don't see how Trader Joe's would ever get implicated legally if there were any issues with expired food.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure the fact that Trader Joe's don't have a legal presence in Canada would make legal action against them a bit tricky.

I can see where by knowing of Pirate Joe's and not taking action against them, someone could argue that Trader Joe's was authorizing him to resale their products.

If there's a presumption of authorization by original manufacturers in the sale of all goods, capitalism is broken.

> With the reselling of groceries you run in to quality control issues, where Pirate Joe's can be selling expired Trader Joe's goods and making people sick, which can make Trader Joe's liable for harm.

Are you sure? After all, if I buy expired Kellogg's cereal from a store and get sick, it's the store I sue, not Kellogg's. Right?...

Agreed, it would be unreasonable to hold a business responsible for what someone else does with their product. I mean, Windows has been crashing PCs for years and I don't see people suing Dell as a result. That would cause so many loophole issues. For example, why sue Dell in that scenario, why not sue IBM for creating the platform in the first place? Or Edison and Tesla's intellectual estates for making electrical devices possible.

No, the store would be liable, in Canada.

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