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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.

> Who are you gonna sue then?

The person who set up the robot.

It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.

Completely agree that the world is full of absolute nonsense, but legally determining responsible parties appears to be relatively straightforward (but does involve a judge or jury)

Yes, agreed. Except "involve a judge or jury" is where the wildcard comes in. I believe there will be reasons to doubt culpability as we move further into the nonsense. Justified or not. My point is really just that we're in some weird territory, so I guess I'm going to make popcorn and watch. Some deeper legal questions lurk in this mess, and I don't think the obvious answers will always necessarily be right.

> The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.

If that was true, then all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not. And “authentication” doesn't change the picture here in Amy way, because it's not actually authentication.

> all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not

Because terms of service require both parties to accept!

If I hold a contract outside your window and scream "you accept this contract" it doesn't bind you simply by looking out the window.

This is literally my point. A POST request on a roure called /login doesn't change anything to that fact.

Good luck finding them or proving it, esp. if done via third party contractors in another jurisdiction

It's much easier when they release huge PR whitepapers about how many felonies they've committed recently, I think. Makes the civil suit much more straightforward in my opinion.

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