In the UK the law suggests that if you participate in an activity, you voluntarily assume the associated physical risk and some legal risk depending on your circumstances/attributes. The physical risks are usually obvious, but the law states that the legal risks should be made known. In other words, responsibility for legal risk can be assumed by written agreement. Essentially you sign a waiver saying that you won't sue if you break your neck. Like Jose suggests however, this is simply a contract not to sue, you are NOT agreeing to give up your rights as the injured party, and such an agreement can be made void very easily.
Just saying that you went out on a big drinking session the night before and were still drunk in the morning would destroy the relevence of whatever you had signed...a drop of alcohol in the system in legal terms means you do not have the mental capacity to agree with whatever you are signing. Nobody could prove otherwise....
As a site owner, the system can get you if something goes wrong and obviously good insurance is a must, but at the end of the day its going to come down to the
weighting of negligence. As a player in a tournament or elsewhere the same applies...so the following is important to remember:
A sporting event is essentially one big agreement in that all stakeholders i.e. the players, site owners, staff etc have a 'duty of care' for each other. In other words people are expected to
'reasonably foresee' how our actions will affect ourselves and others and behave to a standard that reflects that.
So if someone claims negligence the law will ask....was there a duty of care? and was the standard of care/behaviour imposed by this duty breached? (there are 4 things really but these are the 2 key).
Therefore the law will determine: who could foresee their actions causing harm to another person (potentially) and did they then conduct themselves in a way that did not
reasonably prevent harm coming to the other party. Importantly,
this 'standard of care' drifts with the level of knowledge and skill held by people. In paintball terms, a punter on a weekend visit to a rental site has very little responsibility for himself yet an experienced tournament player has a much greater knowledge of the risk to himself and others, and therefore should have a much greater knowledge about how he needs to behave to control these risks.
Therefore if you show up to a tournament with lenses in your goggles that are 6 years old, cracked etc, you get gogged, your lenses fail, and you get blinded....this is likely your own fault and the law will see it this way. Likewise if you shoot someone 300 times in the head and he falls and breaks his hip, you are likely the negligent party - as a seasoned player you knew the risk to the player very well and behaved in a manner below a 'reasonable standard' of care for that person. On the otherhand, if you are a punter and your rental equipment fails and you get hurt, it's likely that negligence on the part of the site caused your injury as they had a greater duty of care.
Accidents do happen, and the law as I have hopefully outlined will not always find fault (negligence) with the accused party. In anycase, it is unlikely that signing waivers will protect anyone to a complete extent...lawyers are there to ensure that by picking away at whatever the waiver process was. The best protection is obviously to (as an organiser/site owner) take all measures to protect people from reasonably foreseeable harm (the extent of which is determined by the skill of the players), and (as a player)...use your (not so) common sense!!
Paintball isnt the legal nightmare people might expect it to be because, fortunately, the vast majority of people in paintball (in terms of organisers) take safety very seriously and the majority of players do not go around lusting to hospitalise their opponents (bar Lasoya)....so sleep easy Icejohn.
