CASUALTY PROVISIONS · 5 MIN READ

Coverage B Offenses and Coverage C Med Pay

Coverage B, Personal and Advertising Injury, is an offense-based grant: instead of accidents, it covers seven enumerated offenses — false arrest, detention, or imprisonment; malicious prosecution; wrongful eviction, wrongful entry, or invasion of the right of private occupancy; libel, slander, or disparagement; oral or written publication that violates a person's right of privacy; use of another's advertising idea in your advertisement; and infringement of copyright, trade dress, or slogan in your advertisement. Anything not on the list — negligent infliction of emotional distress, for example — is simply not a Coverage B offense, though it may qualify as bodily injury under Coverage A where mental anguish is included. The privacy-publication offense maps closely onto the common-law privacy torts, and the advertising offenses apply only within the defined term advertisement. Coverage B carries its own exclusion set: knowing violations of another's rights, material published before the policy period (the prior-publication doctrine), breach of contract (with a carve-back for implied contracts to use another's advertising idea), broad intellectual-property infringement (with the copyright, trade-dress, and slogan carve-back inside an advertisement), and statutory-distribution violations aimed at TCPA and CAN-SPAM claims. The employment-related practices exclusion, added by endorsement, wipes out both Coverage A and Coverage B for claims arising from refusal to employ, termination, and employment-related conduct such as harassment, defamation, discipline, or humiliation directed at the person — pushing the whole exposure to EPLI. Coverage C, Medical Payments, pays reasonable medical expenses regardless of fault for bodily injury caused by an accident on the insured's premises, on ways next to them, or arising from operations. It is a goodwill coverage with modest limits — typically five to ten thousand dollars per person — designed to resolve small injuries before they become lawsuits. It excludes any insured, tenants, and persons hired to do work (employees), while volunteer workers are expressly carved back into eligibility. Businesses that prefer to avoid nuisance claims can delete Coverage C entirely with the medical payments exclusion endorsement for a small credit, leaving Coverage A intact for fault-based bodily injury claims.