Hypotheticals
software development, law and ethics
1.
Consumer protection/contractual liability
You dream up a fantastic disk utility that speeds up hard disks by 300%,
code it overnight, find that it works on your computer and instantly announce
it to the world. It is offered for sale in Sydney to anyone that wants it over your web site.
However, you are really clever and see no
need to leave any of your nifty ideas out, or remove debugging tools. So it
seems to be so complicated to operate that many stupid, ignorant, illiterate
people misunderstand its operation and end up deleting half their files, and
turning the rest into permanently encrypted archives.
You have an End User License Agreement that
anyone using it has to click yes to in order to operate it. In this, you say, "I
am not responsible for anything stupid that you do, use it completely at your
own risk. In case of dispute, this will be heard by the Court of Infinite
Justice in Gauntanomo Bay Cuba, which is run by a friendly lawyer in
the US as a commercial dispute
resolution service, with no appeals anywhere."
You are working at a major OS developer.
There are concerns about market dominance
and abuse of power. There is a competitor which has a well-respected utility
which reads a new and popular form of message, such as a mobile phone picture
message, which is just starting to take off, in a novel way.
You are told to work out a strategy that
involves creating a new reader software architecture which will be bundled into
the OS, and have other parts of the company work at altering the standard phone
message protocol so that your software's messages will be able to read standard
messages but standard software will not be able to read yours. You suspect this
will be annoying to users, but your managers point out that everyone will have
to use your software in the end, as you will bundle it.
You are a web system developer, and you are
asked to create a web system that takes records of criminal court cases and
enters the details of the offences people are charged with and makes them
available, for a fee, to anyone.
v Spent convictions
v Privacy
v Information completeness - acquittals
You are asked to develop a system that
tracks users of your employer's web site and work out, using a variety
of really cool clever tricks, the email address of the person looking at
a particular
page, and create a file which records this, attempts to identify the
person, and looks up a variety of public information via search engines
and government
registries.
The result is to compile a profile of the person, their
interests and activities, so you can tailor individual messages to them which
you then send to everyone's email address you can discover.
You are also asked whether this software
that can be turned into a bot which is loaded onto the visitors computer, to
save your server from having to do all the work, and extract addresses from
their disk.
David Vaile
Executive Director
Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre
Faculty of Law, University of NSW
T: (02) 9385 3589