Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> then assess the lossless distribution of that liability amongst the members

It's very possible that no person did anything wrong at all, but combined there was illegal behavior.

For example: Action A+B is illegal, and A by itself and B by itself are legal. A company did A+B, but the individual employees only did A, or only did B, and neither knew about the other.

> it is just a question of who and what bears the responsibility.

Are you implying you will make someone liable for doing nothing wrong? Simply because of his co-worker? Who would agree to work under such conditions?

View on HN

> Are you implying you will make someone liable for doing nothing wrong?

This leaves out an important part of liability and the concept of trust as a whole - neglect. Simply doing nothing wrong is not the end-all be-all. If you did nothing wrong, it's possible you should have been aware of potential things that could have gone wrong, and prevented them.

If the company and procedures are such that illegal things can happen in tandem that's something that should have been caught, and prevented. This is why we have, for example, licensing for engineers.

A civil engineer does not only need to consider his part, his bridge. He must consider the conditions, the inspectors, the wind, the future. He may be wrong, and of course we require some slack. But still, that expectation is there.

If, hypothetically and arbitrarily, a CEO claims to not be responsible for some company's evil action, I can turn around and argue that by being CEO it is his job to assume that responsibility, and that his apparent ignorance of the situation is not a defense, but rather proof of his own neglectful conduct.

Liability could fall to a third person. For instance, the compliance officer could have a specific obligation to assure that A+B does not happen.

This is very much reminiscent of "rights amplification" and "synergy" in the capability security model, where historically one of the physical manifestations of this is that of the can + can opener which combine to reveal the contents of the can.

Personally I'm extremely curious to hear about legal examples of the same, if you can provide tangible ones!

>> Action A+B is illegal, and A by itself and B by itself are legal. A company did A+B, but the individual employees only did A, or only did B, and neither knew about the other.

That's a really interesting idea. Can you give some real live example of such situation that really happened?

Many "if you know X, you cant do Y" kind.

If you know floor is wet, you cant let people in

If you know insider information, you cant trade.

If you know sb have disabilities, you must provide assistance.

If you give immunity for these, the lawyer will ensure the one in the act never know those information. OTOH, if we hold this to a person, someone can be hold accountable for some systemic communication failure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com