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Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems 175

After the outage, Research in Motion CTO for Software David Yach said a back-
log of messages to Europe created a cascading outage effect around the world.
The company determined the root cause of the initial European BlackBerry
e-mail service and said there was no evidence that a hack or security breach was
involved.
RIM customers in Europe had been suffering from major outages for days, but
it wasn’t until the Americas caught the bug that BlackBerry customers started
complaining on Twitter of mail delays and lack of access to their BlackBerry
devices. Yach described the initial outage as a failure of one of RIM’s core
switches. However, the real trouble began when RIM’s redundant systems failed
as well. “The failover did not function as expected,” Yach said, “despite the fact
that we regularly test failover systems.” This led to a significant backup of mail.
Who is liable for any economic harm caused to individuals or businesses that
could not access their e-mail during this three-day period? If consumers pay for
cell phone service, come to rely on it, and then are denied service for a signifi-
cant period of time, is the cell phone provider liable for damages?
This case reveals the difficulties faced by information systems executives who
ultimately are responsible for any harm done by systems they have selected
and installed. Beyond IT managers, insofar as computer software is part of a
machine, and the machine injures someone physically or economically, the pro-
ducer of the software and the operator can be held liable for damages. Insofar
as the software acts like a book, storing and displaying information, courts have
been reluctant to hold authors, publishers, and booksellers liable for contents
(the exception being instances of fraud or defamation), and hence courts have
been wary of holding software authors liable for software.
In general, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to hold software producers
liable for their software products that are considered to be like books, regard-
less of the physical or economic harm that results. Historically, print publishers,
books, and periodicals have not been held liable because of fears that liability
claims would interfere with First Amendment rights guaranteeing freedom of
expression.
What about software as a service? ATM machines are a service provided to
bank customers. Should this service fail, customers will be inconvenienced and
perhaps harmed economically if they cannot access their funds in a timely
manner. Should liability protections be extended to software publishers and
operators of defective financial, accounting, simulation, or marketing systems?
Software is very different from books. Software users may develop expecta-
tions of infallibility about software; software is less easily inspected than a book,
and it is more difficult to compare with other software products for quality;
software claims actually to perform a task rather than describe a task, as a book
does; and people come to depend on services essentially based on software.
Given the centrality of software to everyday life, the chances are excellent that
liability law will extend its reach to include software even when the software
merely provides an information service.
Telephone systems have not been held liable for the messages transmitted
because they are regulated common carriers. In return for their right to pro-
vide telephone service, they must provide access to all, at reasonable rates, and
achieve acceptable reliability. But broadcasters and cable television stations are
subject to a wide variety of federal and local constraints on content and facilities.
In the United States, with few exceptions, Web sites are not held liable for con-
tent posted on their sites regardless if it was placed their by the Web site owners
or users.

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