Another Laptop Explodes... But Who's at Fault?

This issue didn't get a lot of press when it happened late last week, perhaps because laptops going up in flames has become a tired, almost cliched, story. But laptops (in this case, yet another Dell) are still catching fire.

The twist is that the battery that caused the fire in question was one of the ones recalled last year. Laptop battery fires were probably the biggest technology story of 2006, but here we are well into the latter half of 2007 and people are still using computers with recalled batteries. I'd have a little sympathy for a little old lady who only used her laptop to check AOL and never kept abreast of technology news... but the owner of the laptop was a computer network administrator at a hospital. In other words: The guy is probably paid to know about this stuff!

Still, it leads one to ask whether Dell has been absolved of responsibility here. What happens if a consumer never hears about a product recall and that product causes a problem? What if the consumer did hear the recall alert, but chose to ignore it? Where does Dell's responsibility end and the buyer's begin? Gizmodo has asked for legal input on the subject, and I'd like to hear it too. I'm inclined to side with Dell on this one (the computer companies did a decent job of handling the recall in my opinion), but U.S. law is a strange beast. What does the law really say on topics like this?

Meanwhile, it's not a bad time to double-check to make sure your battery isn't on the recall list. Here's my master list of all manufacturer battery recall pages so you can check your system. Be safe out there.