§ 147.081.Affirmative Defense: Notice to Cure or Correct

The chapter’s principal defence, and it has both a three-part core and a pricing condition.

Subsection (a) sets the three elements. It is an affirmative defence if the claimant: was notified in the prescribed manner that the product may manifest computer date failure; was offered a cure or correction; and the offered cure would have avoided the harm caused by the failure.

The third element is the substantive one. An offered fix that would not have prevented the loss supplies no defence, so the defendant must show the cure worked.

Subsection (b) adds a pricing requirement, and it is tiered.

For a recent consumer product, the defendant must prove the charge did not exceed the reasonable charges for delivery and installation — so the fix itself had to be free.

For anything else, the charge must not have exceeded the reasonable and necessary costs to develop, produce, deliver, and install the cure — cost recovery, but no margin.

That tiering is the chapter’s consumer protection. A vendor could not sell a household buyer a fix for a defect in what it had already sold them and then rely on the offer as a defence.

Subsection (c) closes a loophole: a cure designed to work for only a limited period gives no defence for harm occurring after that period expires.

Windowing techniques of that kind were common, and deferred the problem rather than solving it.