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Making Software Vendors Pay for Negligence


The U.K. House of Lords is considering transferring the costs of insecurity away from consumers

By David Worthington
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September 5, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The Chevrolet Corvair was recalled after consumer advocates claimed that it was unsafe at any speed; there was a clear commercial incentive for General Motors to manufacture safe products. But what incentive does the software industry have to produce secure software? The upper house of the British Parliament may not have much power, but it has the software business in its sights.

The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords published a report in August on personal Internet security, which concludes that it is all too easy for vendors to “dump risks” onto consumers through licensing agreements to avoid paying the costs of insecurity.

The report stated that efforts to promote best practices have been hampered by a lack of commercial incentives to make products secure. The committee’s solution is to propose transferring the cost of insecurity onto demonstrably negligent hardware and software manufacturers, with the long-term goal of establishing a framework for vendor liability across Europe.

The report makes detailed recommendations about the form of the proposed law. It also details short-term goals such as enacting data breach notification laws, providing guidance to the courts, researching IT security, and suggesting best practices for the software industry.

Graham Titterington, a principal analyst at Ovum specializing in IT security and business continuity, believes that the committee’s proposals are impractical. “The complexity of all of the issues is too great to legislate in a universal fashion. In the event that defects are known and reported and not fixed in a reasonable manner, there are areas where negligence would be appropriate. Automatic liability for all errors is not realistic.”

Titterington added that the industry simply does not have the knowledge and technology to produce totally secure software. Indeterminate factors such as whether the consumer has taken steps to mitigate vulnerabilities, the extent to which the software is being used, and the class and value of the software are the gray area of the law.




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