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Comment by TomMckenny | Hacker News Reader

How is it that software makers are culpable when their product us used to commit a crime but not gun manufactures?

Is it that copyright violation is such a "heinous" crime that special rules apply?

Unlike victims of gun crimes, the victims of copyright violation have the money and lobbying power to effect change.

No, unlike gun owners and manufacturers, software developers have no effective lobbying organization and get treated liked 2nd class citizens. No one fears angering software developers before an election.

I agree with you (regarding gun owners as a protected class) and I believe our two claims are complementary rather than adversarial.

> No, unlike gun owners and manufacturers, software developers have no effective lobbying organization

They just haven't been clever enough to organize their own customers, or some other mass front, politically the way the gun industry has.

I think your reversing that, as the customers are out front. That's the mistake that keeps getting made by the NRA's opponents. The NRA is only effective because its people over industry. Industry-lead groups need a whole lot more funding to be effective.

Any software developer that is looking for leadership from the software industry is going to be very disappointed. Often, the industry doesn't really have the best instance of developers in mind.

Unlike victims of gun crimes, the victims of copyright violation do not need to contend with a fundamental right to effect change.

While that certainly does factor in, it normally just means that it takes longer for it to change. And well, people have been murdered with guns for centuries already, so I think those would cancel each other out.

One has a Constitutional amendment. The other doesn't. Also, gun owners are better organized than content consumers or technologists.

There's no constitutional amendment protecting gun manufacturers from being sued. Only a law.

Along with precedent and logical thinking.

The vast majority of use cases of Kodi would be covered by the 1st amendment.

In recent decades even the most frivolous copyright claims supersedes the 1st amendment in the eyes of both the courts and corporations. I imagine if they were invented today, the xerox, tape-recorder or printing-press would have a very hard time.

But you are right, consumers and technologist have near zero clout.

Whether one agrees or not, Google is within their rights to remove Kodi from their autocomplete product.

Whether one agrees or not, Dick's Sporting Goods is within their rights to remove partial/all (can't remember what they did exactly, honestly) gun sales.

So they're not really all that different. Kodi isn't considered culpable for people using it in a bad way here, just Google is removing it from autocomplete in a precautionary manner. Likewise, guns and Dick's.

Nobody is talking about weither google is legally allowed to do this, stop conflating legality with morality.

I think that they clearly aren't conflating the two. "Whether one agrees or not" is "Regardless of whether you consider Google's/Dick's actions moral".

The question was why gun manufacturers aren't legally accountable for crimes committed with their products while software developers are.

The (paraphrased) answer provided is "They aren't; Google removing Kodi from autocomplete is similar to sporting goods stores removing guns from sale".

The Kodi project is not legally accountable for civil infringement committed with their devices for the same reason that gun manufacturers aren’t. Because both have legal purposes. The fact that people do illegal things with them is not the manufacturer’s fault in this case.

In the US, tort law defines manufacturer liability and there is no negligence or design defect.

There are manufacturers who solely make piracy boxes running Kodi who are frequently charged (https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/25/kodi-box-guilty-reversal...). And if gun manufacturers marketed a device with a primary purpose of murder they would likely be charged.

In business law class, we had a case about a switchblade manufacturer adding features only useful for stabbing people. But I can’t find a real reference on Google.

Link- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_liability

I agree with everything you wrote. The switchblade case sounds interesting; I hadn't heard about it before, but that certainly makes sense.

Not sure what your point is here. Google went to-the-max apeshit insane in their censoring/blocking of gun-related product searches recently, to the point that Google Products search wouldn't return anything labelled with the color burgundy. Surely Google thinks gun manufacturers are so intensely bad as to have 'punished' them via search controls Far, far more than they have here with Kodi.

Aside: Neither of these seems like useful exercises for Google.

"armalite" auto completes and even helpfully suggest the AR15, the exact weapon used in all the most spectacular massacres.

I'm not suggesting Google interfere with either. I'm suggesting copyright forces have an unreasonable amount of clout, much of it invisible. More even than a mass movement against school massacres.

Try searching for "shopping" results for "ar15", "armalite 15", and "ak47". It will show they have explicitly filtered out "ar15" shopping search results

Google prohibited gun-related sales since 2012. The "burgundy" incident followed the Parkland shooting where 17 were murdered, it was a mistake quickly rectified.

Many sites changed their policies regarding guns in anticipation of the changes to Section 230.

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