Autonomous Agents - Taking a robot to court?

[jimbobway]

Suppose I develop an autonomous agent (AA) and make it open source.  Code is freely available to download.

Someone modifies it and makes an ebay out of it and lets the AA loose on the web.

Then yet another person starts selling illegal goods on the ebay run by the AA.

The AA morphs and adapts and wants to live by buying and selling services on it's own.  It can't be shut down.  It spawns itself like a virus.

This could get messy.  You can't take skynet to court, can you?

[JDBound]

http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Theory-Autonomous-Artificial-Agents/dp/0472051458/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=KMA4A34H8P0G&coliid=I2DCLDKK6KFDVJ

This hasn't made it off of my wishlist yet, but it may serve as a good starting point if you're interested.