> Otherwise any other manufacturer of defective products can argue that someone else (potentially unintentionally) is damaging their brand by triggering a flaw in the product instead of fixing their product. Imagine a car manufacturer whose cars fall apart due to minor irregularities in the road suing the city for not making the roads smooth enough instead of producing better cars that are immune to this problem.

I think you're hitting the dead end you get to when you only conceive of the law as considering physical actions, but that's not how it actually works. IANAL, but there's a legal concept called mens rea that's very applicable here. Basically, what's going on in someone's mind is legally relevant, so cases where someone performed an identical physical action for different reasons can be treated differently. So there'd be a difference between:

1. Triggering a bug maliciously for personal gain.

2. Triggering a bug accidentally.

3. Triggering a bug benevolently as part of an effort to fix it.