| ▲ | saltcured 20 hours ago | |
I think people are scratching at a cognitive dissonance around: 1. Consumer protection, product safety, and liability. 2. Truth in advertising, fraud prevention, etc. 3. Freedom of expression, association, publication, etc. There is legal precedence in concepts like "attractive nuisance" to put the liability on a producer or owner not to allow the naive public to encounter their dangerous constructions. But we generally allow for media to illustrate such things, i.e. you can depict dangerously unprotected swimming pools, booby-traps, or poisoned food distribution in a book, image, or movie. You get in trouble when you put any of this in the real world though. This is particularly confusing with software because of its duality as being something like speech or media that we can publish and also something like tools or products that can be manufactured, distributed, and consumed with observable results in the real world. Who is liable when the unsafe software is distributed and converted from speech into machine action by naive end users? | ||