[dyadic]

I find the legal culpability of this fascinating.

Right now it is an extremely concrete example, and really easy to say that the originator of the bot is at blame and should be prosecuted for buying illegal items.

But, how advanced does a bot have to be before it itself is at blame? What if they'd programmed it to reach out and purchase from any vendor it could find? What if it wasn't programmed to do anything but made random acts, took feedback and then learned from it?

[aeturnum]

I imagine that, for the foreseeable future, bots will be treated like minors. Their creators will be largely responsible for their actions and contracts with the bot/minor are really contracts with the legal guardian.

[Sven7]

There is a bot called WallStreet that is never to blame for anything it does, which really is much more fascinating.

[frik]

It's called HFT and is done by bots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading