Liability insurance won&#x27;t save your life if you get hit by a few hundred pounds of tree. It will just move money around. If you want to use an old tree-swing the onus is on you, the user to make sure that it is safe because if it isn&#x27;t <i>you</i> pay the price. Somebody else might have installed that swing for a bunch of kids weighing 45 pounds and they used it for years without a problem. Then some full grown adult comes along and the branch breaks, either because the rope has scoured the bark enough that it started to rot or simply because it is overloaded.<p>Trees are natural items, not engineered, ridiculously strong, most of the times and unpredictable when it comes to failure modes. Even perfectly healthy trees can lose branches. Sometimes accidents are just that: accidents.<p>What could the owner have done to ensure that this did not happen? For all we know he tried the swing himself the day before and it was fine. At least at the time of making the advert it was still fine and short of &#x27;destructive testing&#x27; to figure out how much load it supports there is no way to know what it will handle except for trying to see if it supports <i>your</i> weight.