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I think a good example of people who exploit bugs in people to get rich are con artists, and what they do is usually considered illegal. Sure, there are various reasons why what they do feels wrong, they may have to lie and misrepresent things, they may con people (the elderly, etc.) for which the law has specific protections (France has "abus de faiblesse" -- abuse of weakness -- for exploitation of physically or psychologically vulnerable people), they may use threats... But I would be surprised if there was no instance of a con artist being successfully prosecuted for something which basically amounted to getting a responsible person to give them money through a certain sequence of legal inputs. I am not personally sure that I believe this to be a good thing -- the flipside of laws that protect people against themselves is that they may make them less responsible, so care is needed. But I think it is not the case that exploiting bugs in people to get money would be systematically legal. I do think there is a difference (at least in degree, maybe in nature) between computer and human victims: for computers, we feel justified in estimating that people should know that they are dealing with them, and second-guess what they are supposed to do, so that you are blamed if it can be shown that you "knowingly" make them deviate. (Laws have this interesting way of talking about unverifiable states of mind of people, but there can be clues. Did the gamblers who exploited the bug call it a "bug"? If yes, this suggests that they realized it was unintentional, so you may argue whether it is still fair or not that they exploit it, but you can't compare their situation to someone who would hit the bug in good faith.) With respect to this difference, I think the law is also designed to account for the pragmatical fact that everyone has entrusted their lives and businesses to the dumb computers, without having the technical skill to be responsible for what they do, so some protection is afforded computers they malfunction and/or if they have been incompetently manufactured or programmed. I often wonder whether this is a good thing. (When you consider that people are responsible for computers they own or operate, you often get interesting moral consequences.) |
Many of the richest people around got that way by exploiting some "bug", but no one considers them to have done anything illegal. They find a loophole in banking laws and become a billionaire, or you manipulate people psychologically into buying your products (modern marketing). We call these "business" so it's not illegal to exploit these "bugs".