Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 1
This is one the more intelligent comments on the Salon article that I have seen thus far.
Crag is correct. The Salon article is not about whether a programmer should be held liable for the quality of his/her code and for damage to others resulting from that lack of quality; it is about ways in which the author believes the law is threatening to hold programmers liable for damage done by other people's misuse of their code. It is exactly analogous to the question of whether gun manufacturers should be liable for criminals' use of guns to rob, maim and kill, etc.
The reason it does not make sense to prosecute gun owners for making guns, or programmers from writing code that can be used to misappropriate others' intellectual property, is that it forces the programmers to bear the punishment for other people's misconduct, not their own.
I do disagree with Crag that the tobacco litigation is very different. There, the plaintiffs are claiming that the companies manufacturered a health-endangering product and induced them to use it with fraudulent advertising, etc. Again, they are blaming the manufacturer for the consequences of their use of the product. The tobacco companies' efforts to conceal the dangers of smoking, and the misleading nature of their advertising, however, make this a grayer area.
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This is one the more intelligent comments on the Salon article that I have seen thus far.
Crag is correct. The Salon article is not about whether a programmer should be held liable for the quality of his/her code and for damage to others resulting from that lack of quality; it is about ways in which the author believes the law is threatening to hold programmers liable for damage done by other people's misuse of their code. It is exactly analogous to the question of whether gun manufacturers should be liable for criminals' use of guns to rob, maim and kill, etc.
The reason it does not make sense to prosecute gun owners for making guns, or programmers from writing code that can be used to misappropriate others' intellectual property, is that it forces the programmers to bear the punishment for other people's misconduct, not their own.
I do disagree with Crag that the tobacco litigation is very different. There, the plaintiffs are claiming that the companies manufacturered a health-endangering product and induced them to use it with fraudulent advertising, etc. Again, they are blaming the manufacturer for the consequences of their use of the product. The tobacco companies' efforts to conceal the dangers of smoking, and the misleading nature of their advertising, however, make this a grayer area.