GikII 1.02

The coffee break was followed by the session on Copyright and the Openness Ethic in the Information Society, where Adriaan de Groot frightened the masses with his "“Open Source Killer Robots". His talk was illustrated with examples of robots, in science fiction, that due to some malfunction transformed into killer robots. The extrapolation of that to real reality and having a parallel with software in general resulted in the conclusion that having access to the source of the computer program running the robot and the source of software in general, should/would minimize the possibility of bugs that will transform a house-helper robot into a killer one. What will be the responsibility of the software programmer in case that the robot becomes a killer robot? What if the robot is using open source software? The possibility of placing liability on the software programmer/software producer (commercial ones, especially M$) was almost discarded by the subsequent discussion, mainly due to the complex nature of software, but today, looking for a parallel with an airplane (very complex machine too), where in case of failure due to a mistake in the manufacturing process the manufacturer will have at least shared liability, I am not sure that the complexity argument should be allowed to survive much longer. Clearly there is a need for further studies on the emergence of airplane industry, its liability and insurance issue compared to the situation of the software.
The session finished with Roger Burton-West explaining the work, functioning and future developments in BAILII. The idea of BAILII of reversing the trend towards the assassination of deep-linking was clearly presented and the means of doing it too. The possibility of sharing the platform to create others LII looks more than very important and we will engage in some conversations with them and AustLII, who started it all, to create LatinLII or LatLIII or LALII.