A European Union commission voted 17 to 2 to grant robots certain rights, including to be free from beatings. There were some developments on this back in June, and now things are progressing. Now, robots in the E.U. will officially be considered to be ‘electronic persons’ under the law. I suppose this means you can ride with a sex-bot shotgun and drive in the carpool lane now!
The bill, which has been compared as a robot ‘Bill of Right’ also designates that humans are to reign over robots (not vice versa). And also includes a stipulation that kill switches be installed on robots, as a weird form of mercy-killing. That idea was based off of an old Asimov concept apparently.