Hyman Rosen <[email protected]> writes: > David Kastrup wrote: >> Sigh. A program is not a legally responsible entity. The responsible >> party is the _writer_ of the program. I can't push away the >> responsibility about what a program of mine does to somebody else. >> >> Computer viruses are _exclusively_ executed by people different from the >> virus author, on thousands of computers. Does it make _them_ reponsible >> for what their computers do? Does it make the infected _programs_ >> responsible? Does it make the _computers_ responsible? Does it make >> the _virus_ responsible? >> >> No, the responsible party is the virus _author_. What happens is a >> consequence of what _he_ did and intended. > > The reason for that is the law: > <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html> > (5)(A)(i) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, > information, code, or command, and as a result of such > conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, > to a protected computer; > > Virus writers did not automatically become criminals. The law needed > to be amended to make them so. Barring such a special law, actions > done by a computer program are the responsibility of the person who > causes that program to run.
Yes, and the virus author is the one who _causes_ the program to run. That the virus action is set up to be _triggered_ unwittingly by other parties does not make the _triggering_ party responsible. The laws are not there to figure out the responsibility, they are there for figuring out appropriate _criminal_ punishments. Virus writers were (and still are) _accountable_ for the damage they cause. But previous to these laws, they need not expect a jail sentence (except debtors' jail). Yes, there _were_ jailings, but judges were straining for laws to apply. And those worked primarily with military/state computers. > In any case, the actions taken by a computer pursuant to readying a > dynamically loaded library for execution are explicitly defined as not > infringing by US copyright law and are permitted by the GPL with no > restriction. We are talking about the actions taken by the computer programmer pursuant to loading and using a dynamically loaded library as an integral part of the executing program. Not about the computer. A computer is not a legally responsible entity. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
