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Who's Responsible When Your Semi-Autonomous Shopping Bot Purchases Drugs Online?
Nerval's Lobster writes Who's responsible when a bot breaks the law? A collective of Swiss artists faced that very question when they coded the Random Darknet Shopper, an online shopping bot, to purchase random items from a marketplace located on the Deep Web, an area of the World Wide Web not indexed by search engines. While many of the 16,000 items for sale on this marketplace are legal, quite a few are not; and when the bot used its $100-per-week-in-Bitcoin to purchase a handful of illegal pills and a fake Hungarian passport, the artists found themselves in one of those conundrums unique to the 21st century: Is one liable when a bunch of semi-autonomous code goes off and does something bad? In a short piece in The Guardian, the artists seemed prepared to face the legal consequences of their software's actions, but nothing had happened yet—even though the gallery displaying the items is reportedly next door to a police station. In addition to the drugs and passport, the bot ordered a box set of The Lord of the Rings, a Louis Vuitton handbag, a couple of cartons of Chesterfield Blue cigarettes, sneakers, knockoff jeans, and much more.
The creator of a device that breaks the law because the creator either negligently or intentionally set up the device to break the law is responsible, as that creator set the conditions for the operation of the device.
The creators knew both that they were designing something to make its own decisions without programming any real concept of legality in the process, and setting it to operate in an environment which is known to have served to facilitate criminal activity.
The degree of responsibility is up for grabs, and that's why things like limited liability corporations exist, to attempt to shield the owners from being personally liable, but the act itself is still criminal. One can even debate the line between engineering and art, since the bot is an artificial construct that actively does something in the greater world, rather than a passive display or something contained to its own small environment.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
http://xkcd.com/576/