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“software engineers, during wartime, can be liable for what their code does”
- smoldesu 4y agoVague wording like this really makes me wonder how it conflicts with the real-world licensing of code. If you provide something free of charge, without warranty (eg. BSD or GPL), can the government prosecute you for a failure to design your code properly? The liability clauses suggest that you wouldn't, but then again it's hard to tell if this would supercede that precedent. Knowing the US government, no cybercrime is too stupid to prosecute!
- mytailorisrich 4y agoI call BS on this one. The Rome Statute mentioned states: "In accordance with this Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person: (a) Commits such a crime, whether as an individual, jointly with another or through another person, regardless of whether that person is criminally responsible ..." You don't commit a crime "through another person" simply by being a knife manufacturer, a car maker, a gun manufacturer, or a software engineer whose products are them used in a crime. I suspect that the drafting only means that you are not off the hook by sitting back and sending others do the dirty work, as the rest of the section also suggests. Now, if you build software with the aim of facilitating a war crime then this section may kick in. In fact, this is what the paper says when reading the whole paragraph: software dev could be criminally liable if they actively and purposely help develop something for the purpose of committing a war crime. Twitter strikes again.