Personal responsibility

So when are your customers, their end users, or other individuals responsible for their actions? I've been thinking about this concept for about a week now, ever since I was forwarded the statement below. The RPG.net poster is responding to a question in which someone asks about whether the person he's chatting with might be scamming him:

"Is she being held hostage by a Nigerian Prince who can make your [anatomy] grow ... while simultaneously updating your ebay account information?

Because if not, I'd totally pass."

This post makes an important ethical, and legal, point: common sense and personal responsibility are important parts of daily life, and, in particular doing business on the Internet. Unfortunately, I find that over the course of the last ten years, common "internet" sense has waned over time. Indeed, it seems that the Internet provides a convenient excuse for all sorts of moral and ethical lapses . It is amazing to me how many times I've had to handle disputes over accounts that have been compromised because an employee has disclosed a password to a colleague or even a competitor.

The issue of personal responsibility for actions has a pretty deep history in U.S. law. An individual's actions, or lack thereof, often forms either a defense, or a mitigating factor, in many different areas. In contract actions, for example, courts have often held that an individual's failure to take the actions required by the contract precluded a claim for breach of contract .

Defenses of common sense and personal responsibility haven't made their way into cases based on Internet services. However based on other areas of the law, it should be only a matter of time before someone who sues for one million dollars based on his failure to back up his data finds himself on the wrong end of a motion for dismissal.