It seems liability would be another reason to have a firm legal foundation. You wouldn't want to miss an edge case that results in a patient's death. If an investigation showed that your translation software made a mistake that led a doctor to make a bad decision, you'd be in a pretty ugly spot.
It's more about who gets sued. If you make software to fully automate interpretation you would be the party sued. If there is still a human in the loop, you are not liable for their errors.
Liability just means more controls to avoid blame and tighter specifications. Malpractice laws don’t make doctors less dangerous, they mostly encourage ass covering exercises.
I worked at a place that had a formally verified application running on some mainframe. It was wonderful, except that the process was excruciating and maintaining that validation prevented any changes. Every code change cost a minimum of $25,000 2002 dollars.
It was dumb. They would have been better off with a paper process and army of clerks.
There is a huge distinction between being "responsible" for errors and "legally liable".
Responsibility is just good practice - own the problems and provide resolutions. But legally liable? No way.
Even the most mature products still have flaws. I cannot imagine trying to do a startup if "legally liable." -- "Release Early, release often, but carry a huge insurance premium."
No. No, I don't think so.
Thank you and thanks to the other replies. I don't often have a comment that is so full of questions and speculative thinking as this one was.
Negligence makes sense in this case. Just thinking out loud now. If that were made illegal/legal would software engineers need to be state/federally certified having a license to code? Would they possibly need to carry insurance like doctors do? Curious possibilities.
To add on to what you're saying if there isn't there should be legal liability for these software systems in the same way civil engineers have legal liability, from my limited understanding.
I.E. software engineers can become ... real engineers!
Maybe in some industries there is no liability, but I’m in biotech and there is certainly a large amount of software issues that would qualify for litigation
Perhaps, but if there is a liability on that code, you can be damn sure I'll be charging lawyers rates for writing it and it's going to take at least twice as long to produce.
In the end most industries that carry liabilities like this also are required carry error and omissions insurance or something similar. That cost will end up having to be factored in to the cost of the software.
How difficult were the regulatory issues around your software? I've been lead to believe that the FDA is quite difficult to work with on this type of software.
Furthermore, wouldn't legal liability be quite high?
This analogy falls apart pretty quickly. You can't compile legal work product and no one is accountable if it doesn't run, unless you're at the point where malpractice comes into play. Malpractice is really, really hard to prove, though.
Stuff like this is why some software engineers should have the same legal requirements that real engineers do, with personal liability for negligence and the risk of fines or jail.
Any environment where you were developing software that had that impact on safety and where there wasn't appropriate testing and health and safety checks would probably result in someone from management going to jail if someone was hurt.
In a legal/medical environment it is usually much more personal and it is the individual professional who is held responsible - potentially criminally.
There is also the fact that doctors, and many lawyers (although obviously not all - I should have qualified that) do things that have an immediate impact on people (treating the guy having a heart attack, sending that murderer to jail, preventing someone accused of some horrible crime from being railroaded, telling someone that they will die of cancer etc.).
[Note: I am married to a litigation lawyer - so I am biased!]
This is part legal, and part QA, I believe.
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