This also applies qualitatively to physical devices. It takes some effort to determine if a vehicular accident was caused by a fault in the vehicle or a driver error or environmental causes.

Some key inherent differences with older engineering fields is that software can be more complex than physical devices and their functionality can be obfuscated because it is written as text but distributed as binaries.

However, the main problem is that software has not been subjugated to enough legal regulation. Ultimately, all law does is draw lines somewhere in the gray between black and white, but in the case of software there are few lines drawn at all, due to many political and economic reasons. Once we draw the lines, most issues will be resolved.