A recent wave of massive cyberattacks and global disruptions has shined a spotlight on the world’s vulnerability to widely distributed but sometimes poorly written code. Fordham Law Professor Chinmayi Sharma shares expert insights with The Record from Recorded Future News on the situation.
The software industry’s repeated failures have exasperated experts who see little urgency to address the roots of the problem. But bringing companies to heel will be extremely difficult.
“We have literally protected software from almost all forms of liability, comprehensively, since the inception of the industry decades ago,” said Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham School of Law who specializes in cybersecurity and platform liability. “It’s just a golden-child industry.”
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Sharma scoffed at the idea that liability would ruin the industry. “We’ve regulated cars,” she said. “We haven’t seen cars just be litigated out of existence.”
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The White House’s software liability work is still in the early stages.
In April, ONCD held a symposium with legal experts to solicit their ideas. Sharma, who attended the meeting, called it a good first step but said there was “a lot of very, very important stuff that we didn’t really get to in any meaningful way.”
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Some experts are concerned that the final product will heavily favor the tech industry. Sharma said the administration’s assiduous engagement with software companies left her “concerned about regulatory capture.”