John.Spragge@QueensU.CA (12/20/89)
In VIRUS-L #261, Martin Ward asks whether the standard warranty is illegal, or the developers of the AIDS-trojan are within their rights. I am a programmer, not a lawyer, so I can not quote specific law with any authority; suffice it to say that the disclaimers that come with most of the software I buy observe that the liabilities of the manufacturer or distributor of a program vary between jurisdictions. However, from the point of view of a programmer, I can point out that there is a great difference between disclaiming responsibility for the way a program will behave on any arbitrarily chosen machine, and writing a program with the deliberate intention of causing harm. Whether a court would appreciate the difference remains to be seen, but in this case, if a case can be made that the demand for money the "AIDS" program makes is extortion, I doubt that any disclaimer could protect the authors. As for the legal (not to say ethical) question of whether is it is ever acceptable for a programmer to write a harmful program, there is (or was) a case that may shed some light on this issue: Eric Newhouse, in his newsletter on illegal programs, trojan horses, and viruses, claimed that a "legitimate" commercial outfit had written a trojan horse that claimed to crack softguard protection on a file, but actually destroyed the user's data. The claim he reported that the company in question made was that since an attempt to crack softguard protection was a violation of a license agreement, they data of such users was fair game. Mr. Newhouse indicated that the authors of this trojan were being taken to court, which may (if the issue is through the courts yet) shed some light on the judicial perception of this issue. John G. Spragge Taliesin Software Resources Limited Suite 212, 4 Cataraqui Street Kingston Ontario, K7K 1Z7 Phone: (613)545-9577, Bitnet: <SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN>