Responsibility of Microsoft for a bug in MS Excel Our company is using a licensed version of Microsoft Products, including MS Excel 2016. We suffered some financial damage because of incorrect financial calculations, that occurred as a result of the bug in the program. The bug was detected by our team afterwards, after detailed manual inspection of the formula. We checked other users and they all had the same problem was with all of them. Is Microsoft responsible for the damage caused by the bug in its product? I mean, if Microsoft acknowledges the bug or it is otherwise proven to exist that it actually is a bug and actually causing the financial damage, what will be the legal approach and will Microsoft bear responsibility?
You are suggesting strict liability for software bugs. You haven't tried to show any negligence or incompetence on Microsoft's part, but just appear to have assumed that the existence of a bug that causes harm should create liability. Strict liability is rare, at least in the US, and does not in general apply to software. Given strict adherence to the best practice in developing software, there will be bugs, so a bug is not itself evidence of any sort of wrongdoing on Microsoft's part. In real life, if there was strict liability for software bugs, nobody and no business would write software for the use of others, because of the ever-present potential of being wiped out by lawsuits despite all they could do.
By &quot;complain&quot; I assume you mean &quot;take legal action against him&quot;. You would need a legal basis, and a lawyer. When you say that you don't have a contract, I assume you mean that you don't have a piece of signed paper, but you do have an agreement – which is a contract. As far as websites are concerned, there are only a few likely causes of legal action: copyright infringement, and non-payment for services. As far as copyright is concerned, this law may be relevant. If we assume that you and the client are operating in Iran, your copyright is protected, but Iran does not enforce other country's copyright laws (they are not signatories to the Berne Convention). If the issue is that the client is not paying for services rendered, you can sue them. The civil code (in English) is here. See article 219 ff. for the specifics, but basically you show the judge that there is an agreement, and that you were not paid. The client can then argue that you didn't actually do the job agreed to, or that you were paid. There are other possible responses (e.g. the &quot;client&quot; might prove that you agreed to do the work for free), the details of which will come out in your discussion with the lawyer.
You need to check if the original game developers patented the mechanics/rules of the game. For your example, Monopoly was patented, but expired in the 50s and while it would not be a copyright violation to mimic the rules/mechanics, it would be a different intellectual property violation (patent infringement). Spry Fox vs LOLAPPS is also relevant as it extends copyright protection to the implementation of an idea, but ideas (like rules/mechanics) cannot, by themselves, be copyrighted. This means that there is an avenue for the original developer/company to sue even if the visual/audible aspects are different, but the overall gameplay is the same. Also see Tetris Holding LLC vs Xio Interactive Inc. as it relates to the visual aspect of the game.
Basically, you cannot do it. You are required to include the MIT license in any derivative work. However, that holds only for the parts that you import from this other project. You can identify which parts of the final product are copied from the MIT-licensed program (and indicate "these parts are subject to the following MIT license"), and then you can do whatever you want with the remainder that you wrote. The downside of not licensing your material is that nobody can use it. To use it, people would need permission, which is what a license is. If you don't license it, you don't give permission, so people can't use it. You presumably want to subject your own contribution to different licensing conditions, so then you would state those conditions and clearly indicate what parts of the code you wrote.
Sources of Liability Liability can come from: Statute law Contract law Common law Statute Law There may be (almost certainly are) laws in the jurisdiction where Joes Cheap Carnival are operating relating to Work Health and Safety. In general, these laws will impose a non-delegable duty (i.e. one you cant get out of) to comply with certain minimum standards. If operating your software as instructed with reasonable assumptions gives results that lead to an unsafe design then you would be liable in both cases. Contract Law If you are selling this software then you can limit your liability in any way you like providing that the limitation is not unlawful. For example, under Australian Consumer Law (which covers B2B transactions up to AUD$40,000 - how much are you selling for?) you have a non-excludable warranty that the software is fit-for-purpose; so, again, if operating your software as instructed with reasonable assumptions gives results that lead to an unsafe design then you would be liable in both cases. Common Law Only parties to a contract can take action under a contract; anyone you owe a duty of care to can sue your for negligence. A person injured by a machine your software helped design need to demonstrate: You had a duty of care; it would be hard to argue you didn't, You breached that duty; the software was not "fit-for-purpose", There was a factual cause in a "cause and effect" sense; 'but for' your software there would have been no loss, There was a legal (proximate) cause; you may be able to raise something here, if your software was used incorrectly by an engineer, your breach may be too distant Harm; the person must suffer real loss. The only plausible advantage of making your software open source is that you are showing a greater amount of care by allowing your algorithms to be sort-of peer reviewed. This is not a legal shield I would really like to depend on. TL;DR Nothing can stop someone suing you - if they want to sue you they can sue you. Your best defence to a lawsuit is to demonstrate that you did everything a reasonable person could do without the benefit of hindsight Do you really think publishing your code is "everything a reasonable person could do"? You would be far better off: Taking out professional indemnity insurance Validating you algorithms thoroughly Engaging an independent third-party to validate your algorithms Developing proper and thorough testing procedure for your software Testing it in-house Engaging an independent third-party to test it Thoroughly documenting your software including all the assumptions along with the domains where they are valid and invalid.
If you are purely a designer (and not contracted for the daily operation of the site), the answer is "no". GDPR Article 4 defines the "roles" responsible for complying with GDPR, and there are two: Controller and Processor. The Controller is the one who calls the shots. In particular: Decides what personal data to process. This is usually the owner of the web site. The Processor is the one that actually does the processing. This is usually some company providing some sort of data processing service (e.g. SaaS, PaaS, etc.). The relationship between the Processor and the Controller must be contractual. The contract is called a DPA (Data Protection Agreement or Data Processing Addendum). As a designer, you don't fit into any of these roles. If your contract with the client is silent on liability for GDPR compliance, then you have no liability. This goes for projects completed both before and after the May 25 deadline. Of course, if there are GDPR clauses in your contract, then you must fulfil them just as have to fulfil any other contractual obligation. But unlike the controller and the processor, there are no automatic legal liability for a designer or programmer.
Awareness of consequences If you knew (or had reasons to suspect) that the server end implemented something like (whether intentionally, or by way of a bug/omission): if variableThing == **MyValue** { causeALotOfTrouble() } — then yes, you pretty much can be held accountable. Otherwise highly unlikely. By default, it is reasonable to expect that servers handle/filter/sanitise user input properly no matter where the request comes from, so modifying a URL is merely seeking certain data from the server — which it is free to supply or deny. For example, if MyValue is an SQL injection attempt, then yes. If it is trying to filter out the results by a certain criteria, then no.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.