Is it possible to sell truly sentient AI software responsibly? If a programmer writes and sells AI that is truly sentient and conscious, it would be impossible to guarantee the operator's safety. Consider for instance if the operator gravely mistreats the AI and it is driven to act in self-defence. It might try and successfully commandeer the computer and attached network and devices, and destroy data or equipment in it's distress. The chance that it may harm or even kill a person is also a remote possibility, but it exists and cannot ever be removed. (Just as no breeder sells a dog to bite a person, but the breeder cannot completely remove this possibility either.) Is there any amount of warning, EULA, or mitigation that would be possible to ensure all responsibility for damage and loss of life falls to the operator solely? Or is releasing an AI legally irresponsible currently?
So-called AI software does not enjoy a special legal status (at present: one never knows what new law might be added). The question of whether any software can be distributed "safely" or "responsibly" is also not a legal issue. Nor is "true sentience" a relevant consideration, and nothing is guaranteed. When you distribute software of any kind, there is an implied warranty that the product is "fit", and if software kills you, you may be able to sue the creator for negligence. A software creator may then want to disclaim liability, by saying "WARNING: THIS PROGRAM MAY KILL YOU. OCP IS NOT LIABLE FOR ANY INJURIES ARISING FROM USE OF THIS PRODUCT". This may or may not actually remove liability. In the UK "liability for negligence occasioning death or personal injury cannot be excluded", so such a disclaimer will not prevent a suit against the manufacturer. In the US, the issue is determined at the level of the state – here is a summary of the law in the states. Probably the primary question would be whether such a disclaimer is an unconscionable term, and the second question is whether the act constituted gross negligence (not simply "negligence"). Mississippi exceptionally does not allow disclaimers, but even then, it does allow disclaiming liability when it comes to computer hardware and software. A software disclaimer is not inherently unconscionable, though perhaps some specific disclaimer would be found to be. Courts typically disfavor disclaimers in the case of gross negligence, and again determining what constitutes "gross negligence" is determined on a state by state basis. If the act shows "reckless indifference to the rights of others" and "failure to use even slight care or conduct that is so careless as to show com­plete disregard for the rights and safety of others", then the act might be grossly negligent.
I find 3 P. S. § § 459-503-A, the &quot;Dangerous Dog law&quot; online at: https://codes.findlaw.com/pa/title-3-ps-agriculture/pa-st-sect-3-459-502-a.html and https://codes.findlaw.com/pa/title-3-ps-agriculture/pa-st-sect-3-459-503-a.html (law split across two web pages) https://www.pacode.com/secure/data/007/chapter27/chap27toc.html https://www.animallaw.info/statute/pa-dog-law-chapter-8-dogs-consolidated-dog-laws#s502 as well as the dept of agriculture page linked in the question. All of these sources agree in detail, and all specify the $50,000 amount for the insurance and the same amount for the bond (which are separate). None agree with what the self-described ex-policeman is quoted as saying in the question. Moreover, all of them indicate that a &quot;dangerous dog&quot; is one that the magistrate finds fits both (1) and (2) below: (1) The dog has done any of the following: (i) Inflicted severe injury on a human being without provocation on public or private property. (ii) Killed or inflicted severe injury on a domestic animal, dog or cat without provocation while off the owner's property. (iii) Attacked a human being without provocation. (iv) Been used in the commission of a crime. (2) The dog has either or both of the following: (i) A history of attacking human beings and/or domestic animals, dogs or cats without provocation. (ii) A propensity to attack human beings and/or domestic animals, dogs or cats without provocation. A propensity to attack may be proven by a single incident of the conduct described in paragraph (1)(i), (ii), (iii) or (iv). As described in the question, (2) seems to clearly apply but (1) does not. However, a magistrate might find the dog to be dangerous even if the strict requirements are not met, and it is not clear if there is an appeal in such a case. And all this is based only on the statements in the question. Facts not stated there could lead to a different result. The owner would be wise to consult a lawyer on this point. But it does not seem that the ex-policeman was accurately stating the law.
Can Hacker Corp. claim that they acted in good faith, believing that the Permission to Attack was granted by someone from within the company who was allowed to grant such a permission? Unless ACME proves that Hacker knew or should have known that ACME's low-level employee had no authority to make the decision on behalf of ACME, Hacker ought to prevail on the basis that it performed the contract. There is no indication in your description that Hacker targeted other system(s) than the one(s) specified or that it departed from the agreed conditions. Therefore, there is no sign of Hacker breaching the implied covenant of good faith. ACME's evidently poor management (i.e., the turmoil, the delay for signing or denying permission, its low-level employee's opportunity to make sensitive decisions, the company's failure to withdraw the authorization or to take precautions) is not Hacker's fault.
In the UK it is an offence to cause a computer to gain unauthorised access to any program or data held in any computer (s1 Computer Misuse Act 1990). It seems likely that other European jurisdictions have similar laws. Certainly Germany does: Penal Code 202a data espionage (German text - English translation). (I mention Germany because the linked thread does.) It might constitute theft in the jurisdiction if the finder did not take reasonable steps to find the owner - which may include informing the police of the find. Depending on the jurisdiction it might count as 'treasure' or abandoned property such that the finder is obliged to inform the authorities (the jurisdiction has the presumption of ownership of abandoned or lost property - e.g. Scotland), which then decide what to do with it. Legally speaking it seems to me that, to declare it legal, we have to get over such hurdles. [edit] There seems to be some dispute in the comments that cryptocurrency is subject to any regulation, counts as property, is something of value or is something that is owned and can be stolen, such that the person in the questioner's scenario could be held to account under the law for his behaviour. Aren't they merely numbers? No - plainly they do have value because people trade them with currency and goods and services. The UK's tax authority, HMRC, "does not consider cryptoassets to be currency or money" but sees them as having economic value because "they can be 'turned to account' - for example, exchanging them for goods, services, fiat currency (that is money declared by a government to be legal tender) or other tokens". They are "a new type of intangible asset". Individuals are liable "to pay UK tax if they are a UK resident and carry out a transaction with their tokens which is subject to UK tax". They are liable for "Income Tax and National Insurance contributions on cryptoassets which they receive from their employer as a form of non-cash payment [or from] mining, transaction confirmation or airdrops." (HMRC cryptoassets for individuals) Are they property? Something that can be owned, something that can be dishonestly appropriate (i.e. stolen)? That's the interesting dispute. Recently, the High Court of England and Wales ruled in a bitcoin ransomware-related case that "for the purpose of granting an interim injunction in the form of an interim proprietary injunction ... crypto currencies are a form of property capable of being the subject of a proprietary injunction". In that judgment there is some discussion of the authorities for considering or deciding they are property. ([2019] EWHC 3556 (Comm)) read from para 50 if not the whole judgment. In at least two other cryptocurrency-related cases the High Court treated the cryptocurrency as property. Vorotyntseva v Money-4 Limited, trading as Nebeus.com [2018] EWHC 2598 (Ch) and Liam David Robertson v Persons Unknown 2019. There was also a suggestion in the comments that the police would not understand and would not be interested. But there are several jurisdictions where people have been investigated, arrested, prosecuted and convicted of crimes relating to cryptocurrencies. A simple internet search for bitcoin theft, fraud or money laundering will result in some reports. In any case their interest or lack of it is irrelevant to what the law may say.
It is mildly hard to say. First, one has to determine if he was an employee hired to do something like invent the WWW. He "spent time" at CERN, but was an independent contractor in his first period (1980), then took up a fellowship in 1984. "Fellowship" is generally not an "employment" relationship in the relevant sense, and academics are rarely "employees" in the common law work-for-hire sense. It is reported that he "began creating the software and standards for the web on his own as an informal project within CERN". So if anyone holds IP rights (to what?), it would be him. Given where CERN is, it is not self-evident whose copyright law would be applicable. He reports that he wrote the code in CERN Building 31, which appears to be in France, though CERN appears to be in Switzerland (CERN is, in fact, in France and Switzerland). Article 17 of Swiss copyright law says Where a computer program has been created under an employment contract in the course of discharging professional duties or fulfilling contractual obligations, the employer alone shall be entitled to exercise the exclusive rights of use. and otherwise, "work for hire" is not an applicable concept under Swiss law. France, which has the same basic droit d'auteur concept, also have the software exception in Intellectual Property Code Article L113-9: Unless otherwise provided by statutory provision or stipulation, the economic rights in the software and its documentation created by one or more employees in the execution of their duties or following the instructions given by their employer shall be the property of the employer and he exclusively shall be entitled to exercise them. In either venue there is a very narrow path for CERN to hold the copyright to the original software, one that is not likely to match the facts of Berners-Lee's relationship with CERN. It is also true that CERN created a version of web software (the usable version), which was released into the public domain Apr. 30 1993 (p1, p2). It is likewise known that he approved of, and propagated the release of the IP that we associate with the WWW into the public domain. The idea underlying the web is not subject to copyright protection (the text of the proposal would be), but the original code that he wrote would be. It is unknown what relationship exists between that original code any current code, but it highly unlikely that any current code copies original code. Further speculation about the relationship between the original code and anything that exists now would have to be addressed in a History of Computing SE (if there were such a thing). As for patents, since he did not patent the method, it is ipso facto unprotected and out in the open. From the legal POV, the world wide web is not a single thing, so it is meaningless to ask who has dominion over it.
The board is more complicated than you describe. It is a somewhat stylized world map, broken up into regions that do not necessarily correspond to countries. They have names that don't necessarily express what the region is geographically (particularly Ukraine, which extends far to the north of real-world Ukraine). There are defined water routes between certain regions that do not touch. Someone else starting from a world map would be very unlikely to duplicate the Risk board. I believe your friend's board would count as a derivative work. Now, the copyright holder is highly unlikely to come after your friend. I've seen stories of people who made their own X boards, publicized them, and the game company did nothing about it. The company (Hasbro? they own most of those games) would likely consider it as an extra bit of publicity.
Ultimately, the issue presented is as much a technical one as a legal one. You can protect software written in a programming language that you don't own the rights to via copyright. Indeed, the vast majority of copyrighted programs are written in programming languages not owned by the author of the copyrighted work. You can't meaningfully protect software that is subject to a creative commons or MIT license for commercial purposes. The question then becomes, is the material you want to protect simply software written in an open source programming language, in which can you can protect the software, but not the underlying language, or is it a mere implementation of open source software that is not so transformative that its character as open source software (or a derivative work of open source software) is overcome. This would be a question of fact for a fact finding at a trial and would require considerable technical expertise and understanding to evaluate. I know so many startups and platforms are written with open source software so I'm sure there is a clear answer to this but I can't seem to find one on the web. There aren't a lot of clear precedents governing where the line should be drawn. Software of any kind you would recognize as such has only existed for about 50 years. Open source software has only existed for 20-30 years depending upon how you count it. And, open source software has only had widespread commercial use for an even shorter time period. This is an incredibly short among of time in terms of legal history, and it doesn't help that business to business copyright litigation doesn't take place at all in state courts and makes up a pretty small share of the overall federal court docket. And most of the copyright cases that are brought in the federal courts are very simple ones. For example, as of the year 2015, most copyright lawsuits in the U.S. merely alleged that anonymous Internet users downloaded pornography without permission to do so: [T]he adult website Malibu Media is a prodigious enforcer of its copyrights. According to law professor Matthew Sag of Loyola University in Chicago, Malibu alone was responsible for nearly 40 percent of all copyright filings in federal court in 2015. Litigation against anonymous downloaders, by Malibu and other copyright enforcers, made up nearly 60 percent of the federal copyright docket last year. In 2016, there were fewer than 4000 copyright infringement cases filed in the entire U.S. (in all media). And, the percentage of civil cases that go to trial at all in the federal courts (rather than being resolved by a settlement or default judgment) is very small to start with, with many of the cases that are resolved on the merits not appealed. There are fewer than 400 appeals per year, nationwide, in copyright, patent and trademark cases combined, and patent and trademark cases make up and outsized share of that total because the amount of money at stake is higher on average in patent and trademark cases than in copyright cases, and many copyright cases involve copyrights in media other than software. Maybe there are a dozen or two software copyright appeals a year these days. The figures from the last few years, however, are much, much higher than they have been historically, particularly in the area of software copyrights, which is why the case law is so thin on so many more sophisticated areas of software copyright law.
You can't You are asking the analogue of &quot;What happens when you start a game of chess with the black queen on D1?&quot; and the only correct answer is &quot;That is not a legal starting position, the only position the Black Queen may have at the start of the game is D8. Re-setup the board to how it should be.&quot; An AI can't hold property, because it is not a recognized legal entity, and trying to file for a transfer to an illegal recipient is in itself impossible. As such, all your plan fails on step 1 (transfer property to AI) and all other questions are moot - the position required can't come up legally, and attempting to get it done results in the documents that tried to do it being all Void and Null: The person that tried to get rid of the company is the owner. That person is liable for all the tax that needs to be paid. All lawsuits against the corporate or the owner proceed as if nothing had happened. YES, you could be sued for attempted tax evasion, communally called &quot;tax fraud&quot;.