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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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If you are Microsoft, then yeah. You'd go to jail when a Windows vulnerability is found.
In all seriousness though: it would be more likely to be just a civil penalty, or a fine. If we did want corporate jail sentences, there are a few ways to do it. These are not specific to my proposal about software vulnerabilities being crimes; it's about corporate accountability in general.
First, a corporation could have a central person in charge of ethical decisions. They would go to prison when the corporation was convicted of a jailable offense. They would be entitled to know all the goings on in the company, and hit the emergency stop button for absolutely anything whenever they saw a legal problem. This is obviously a huge change in how things work, and not something that could be implemented any time soon in the US because of how much Congress loves corporations, and because of how many crimes a company commits on a daily basis.
Second, a corporation could be "jailed" for X days by fining them X/365 of their annual profit. This calculation would need to counter clever accounting tricks. For example some companies (like Amazon, I've heard) never pay dividends, and might list their profit as zero because they reinvest all the profit into expanding the company. So the criminal fine would take into account some types of expenditures.