Technology Bill of Rights

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia has proposed a pretty good "Technology Bill of Rights" encompassing DRM, neutrality, anonymity, liability for malware, liability for proprietary software, and open source for government. I think it's a great starting point, though some of the Slashdotters suggest modelling it on the US Bill of Rights and/or the Makers' Bill of Rights.

Article 4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product

Related to Article 3, this is a sticky one. On the one hand, a company should be held responsible for damages caused by negligence in their product. On the other hand, attributing this to computer software could be extremely problematic to proprietary software companies. Maybe it should be met halfway -- a proprietary software company is compelled by law to immediately notify the public when vulnerabilities are discovered in their products. They are then granted two weeks to issue a patch to fix the problem. If not, they face increasing fines for every day a patch is not released. Also, there should be a mandatory update check in every product. This is far from a perfect implementation, but some form of this concept needs to be introduced.

Technology Bill of Rights (via /.)

[#1 posted by noen, May 18, 2009 10:59 PM]

"a user has a right to seek damages"

That ain't ever gonna happen. I think someone doesn't understand the nature of the relationship here.

[#2 posted by SKR, May 18, 2009 11:18 PM]

3 and 4 contradict one another. The perveyor of the malware is the responsible party.

the drm provision should exclude rootkits

[#3 posted by Galoot, May 18, 2009 11:35 PM]

Yes, child. This is what we found relevant in 2009.

[#4 posted by Anonymous, May 19, 2009 5:36 AM]

Really - thats the end of shareware and all small time niche programs then.

a: Take any hobby
b: Have laws made up about hobby
a + b = End of hobby in the public arena

If people want to stop bitchin' about the security of Microsoft and all the other companies large enough to be able to mount a legal defence then don't do this.

[#5 posted by mannakiosk, May 19, 2009 7:42 AM]

Galoot, #3: Are you implying that it is silly finding it relevant to have rights having to do with technology?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing either way, but I'd like it if you'd care to elaborate.

[#6 posted by Anonymous, May 19, 2009 8:28 AM]

If you want guarantees like that, be prepared for the corresponding increase in the price of commercial software to cover the developer's costs. You'll also see developers only support software on a very narrow range of hardware and software and installing other software may violate the terms of use and invalidate any claims you might make. It's a slippery slopre...

[#7 posted by merreborn, May 19, 2009 10:28 AM]

"Also, there should be a mandatory update check in every product."

Ugh. These things are frequently so poorly implemented and invasive, and you want to legally mandate MORE of them?

Acrobat pops an update notice up at me once a week. Literally as I was typing the last sentence, Apple Software Update (automatically installed with Safari) popped up. It wants to install "updates" to applications I haven't even installed. These tasks have no business running in the background 24 hours a day.

If anything, give us a single centralized update system -- something along the lines of "yum" or "apt-get". Then at least we only have one shitty auto-update daemon to worry about, rather than 40.