Pure Democracy & the RoboDialer

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Sun, Nov 24, 2013 @ 17:11 PM

Tags: technology innovation, technology implementing law, public policy, legaltech

The ultimate digital townhall has arrived, and with it, have we seen the flicker of opportunity for pure democracy?  A recent experience tells me the time has arrived for a bold politician to consider offering an experiment in such democracy.

A few evenings ago, my home phone rang.  When I answered, a robodialer asked if I'd like to join the Town Hall being conducted my my local Congresswoman, where her team was available to answer questions on the Affordable Care Act and the insurance process.  I pressed the assigned key and was dropped into a conversation in which other constituents were queing up, asking questions, and getting answers, all shared with everyone one the line. 

I want to be clear - I had not signed up or indicated interest in any way.  I have not yet been able to confirm, but it appeared that the robodialer called the home of every voter in the district and the call had no limit on participants.  Kudos to my Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, because her assembled team answered a myriad of diverse questions during a call that went on for a long time.

During the course of the call, one of the staffers would occasionally ask a survey question and ask the constituents to enter their vote through their phone keypad.  This is when my enthusiasm really picked up. 

When I first moved to New York City many years ago, before email and the web, I wondered if the sheer proximity of an entire constituency would make it possible to experiment with truly representative government, for an elected official to actually accumulate the opinion of the people on an issue and vote according to the majority. At the time, I envisioned ballots dropped in stacks at buildings, or delivered with the newspaper, or some equivalent.  The logistics of collecting the returns were achievable but labor intensive.

In the mechanics of this digital town hall call, were the mechanisms for achieving such an experiment. The robodialer combined with Q&A for difficult details and a phone survey would make it possible to get meaningful and representative constituent input.  And, this can be done asynchronously, so no need to get all constituents at the same moment.

When I speak about LegalTech innovation, this is the sort of thing I'm envisioning.  With all due respect to those who are offering enhanced document management applications for the legal profession, that's not what I'm seeking.  Technology offers the opportunity to implement the law as we know it in completely new ways, or to create wholly new legal paradigms.  Here is the opportunity for a bold politician to offer to represent his or her constituents in the most pure form of democracy.  Any takers? 

 

 

 

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Disrupt Law!! Spark-athon (InternetWeekNY) - UPDATE

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Thu, May 23, 2013 @ 08:05 AM

Tags: technology implementing law, technology for lawyers, Internet Week, legaltech, entrepreneur, startup, IWNY

The Disrupt Law!! Spark-athon is sold out!  I knew it would be exciting to put on an InternetWeekNY event.  We're bringing together Matt Hall (Founder, Docracy), Tom Chernaik (CEO, CMP.LY), and Steven Cherry (Journalist, @TechWisePodcast) to inspire 25 lawyers and 25 hackers brainstorming new legaltech projects and ventures. We added in a happy hour - the space and the beer donated by WeWork Labs in Soho - and prizes - Grand Prize donated by Dreamhost.

 

But, I had no idea how exciting it would be.  We've got a waiting list! We've received tremendous support from the New York  Legal Hackers and the nyhacker meetups. Jonathan Askin, a noted tech law professor, is going to participate.  Extra thanks to him for pitching in getting the word out and adding volunteers. And, Josh Kubicki, author of the TechCocktail blog I've been quoting, has come in from Cincinnati to participate!

 

 

 

 

 

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Disrupt Law!! Spark-athon (InternetWeekNY)

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Mon, May 06, 2013 @ 18:05 PM

Tags: technology implementing law, technology for lawyers, Internet Week, legaltech, entrepreneur, startup, IWNY

I'm a fan of InternetWeekNY - now 45,000+ New Yorkers mingling to teach, pitch, and network all manner of things web.  So, this year, I'm the proud sponsor of an event.  On Thursday, May 23, from 4pm to 6pm, I'll be hosting DISRUPT LAW!! SPARK-ATHON in Soho.  

The event will include speed-networking and collaborative brainstorming among 25 innovation-oriented lawyers and 25 venture-seeking hackers/developers.  The goal is to spark new legaltech ventures in disruptive legal technology.  For those not in the startup scene, that's "disruptive" as in "ground-breaking innovativion" NOT as in "breaking someone else's technology.'" 

Motivating descriptions of successful ventures will be provided by Matt Hall, co-founder of Docracy; Tom Chernaik, CEO of CMP.LY; and one more surprise.  Docracy was the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon in 2011; it offers an open collection of legal contracts and a mechanism to negotiate and sign documents online.  CMP.LY provides a full and creative suite of tools for compliance and risk management for social media.  And, of course, there'll be a little something to eat and drink.

I haven't been this excited since I created the LinkedData Lab, which launched new careers and companies.  Can't wait to see what Disrupt Law!! brings!  


Click here to reserve your ticket


Follow this event on twitter - #DisruptLawIWNY

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The Cross-Border eDiscovery Challenge & The Possible Accountable Systems Solution

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Thu, Jun 18, 2009 @ 13:06 PM

Tags: access control, technology implementing law, privacy technology, technology for lawyers, accountability, knowledge discovery for litigation, information management, data protection, digital evidence, technology for business managers, global outsourcing, information security, digital rights, privacy, eDiscovery, forensics

Cross-border eDiscovery is a hot topic this year. The decreased cost of storage has resulted in nearly everyone retaining massively greater quantities of information. Email and the Web have driven a shift in data to less formal, less structured records and files. And, globalization of business has caused the relevant information for an increasing number of lawsuits to be spread among multiple countries. Courts have instituted new rules for how parites will engage in discovery related to this digital evidence. And, these new rules are putting some lawyers in the cross-hairs of other governmental digital control activities. Lawyers, by and large, are not technologists and the challenges arising from handling this mass of distributed data are proving daunting. Technology vendors are offering significant assistance but still more is required.

Discovery, at its simplest, is the concept that one party to a lawsuit can learn what the opposing party knows that is relevant to the resolution of the case. In the US, this had long been accomplished through gamesmanship and strategy (think, hide-and-seek meets go-fish) while, for example, the UK had moved on to affirmative disclosure, the idea that each side needs to identify the truly relevant and provide it. In either case, the parties have needed to decide what data to preserve and how to search it. For a variety of reasons, corporations are adding and deleting data all the time -- doing things like updating client or supplier addresses, changing prices, adding sales, marking deliveries. So, typically, one needs to select a moment in time that's relevant to the issues in a lawsuit and look at all data from that time or up until that time. This is no easy task, as the challenges of selecting the moment, deciding how to save the data, and which tools will provide the best search result are all subject to debate.

Handling a case that involves data in multiple countries compounds the challenge. The EU has had detailed and tightly controlling rules about the handling of information about people by commercial entities for nearly thirty years. By comparison, the US historically has had a comparatively limited concern about the privacy of people whose identities appear in commercial files. For example, in many cases EU rules prohibit making the sort of "moment in time" copy of entire systems described in the last paragraph and have rules that as a practical matter prohibit sending data about people out of the country. Recently, these rules have come into head-on conflict with courts in the US requiring that certain information be turned over in discovery. The decision not to violate the EU rules has resulted in some significant financial penalties being imposed by US judges, while the decision to violate the EU rules and provide the data in the US has resulted in some equally significant financial penalties being imposed by European judges, leaving litigators between a rock and a hard place.

Much discussion is ongoing about ways to resolve this problem. For example, governmental, public policy, and commercial bodies are discussing possible changes to their rules. New forms of insurance may be offered to indemnify parties caught in the current situation. At the same time, there is a quiet march forward of new technologies which may resolve some of the issues. For example, systems that track each data transaction at a very granular level and account for their compliance with rules, called "accountable systems", are in development. Such systems would make it possible to understand the data in the system at a particular moment in time without requiring a "copy" to be made. And, they would be able to recognize competing data rules and apply the correct ones, wherever the resolution of a rules conflict is possible.  In theory, this technology might also make it possible to transfer the substantive portions of the information without the personal information, so that the parties could define very small subsets that are relevant and actually required to be disclosed, thus limiting the release of personal information to subsets so small that requirements, like notice to the individuals in the data, could reasonably be met.

While this new type of technology offers promise for resolving some of the cross-border eDiscovery challenges without requiring any jurisdiction to change its rules, it has drawn relatively little attention in this context to date.  Perhaps this is because the technology needs to be refined and then implemented in the day-to-day digital business practices of organizations before it can be capitalized upon to address this issue.  How long it will be before this occurs will be driven by how quickly people recognize the problems this technology can solve.

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Legal Standards in a Technologically Bifurcated World

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Thu, Jan 29, 2009 @ 10:01 AM

Tags: access control, identity management, technology implementing law, privacy technology, technology for business managers, law about technology, public policy, technology b2b customer service, information security

It's not news that our society is divided into technological haves and have-nots.  Much has been written about the advantages lost or gained - education, professional, and social - based upon the primacy and recency of one's technology.  Recently, I've become increasingly attuned to another place where technological caste matters -- legal standards. 

It's been clear to me for quite some time that the lawyer who resonates with technology can do more successful and faster legal research; propound vastly superior discovery requests; and produce substantially more incisive disclosures.  It's now becoming increasingly clear to me that the law itself is being skewed by those of us who live to keep up with the next big thing in technology.  Debates among lawyers rage in my email inbox about the differences in things like encryption technologies and metadata standards, with lots of cool techie references to things like ISO, NIST, Diffie, OASIS, and XACML.  

In the meantime, I was on the the Social Security Administration website the other day and they wanted me to use an eight digit alphanumeric password (case insensitive, no special characters) to upload W2 and other sensitive tax information.  My bank's brokerage affiliate is using the same outdated and readily hackable password technology  I still see commercial and bar association websites seeking personal and financial information without indicating that they're using SSL or some other baseline method of securing the information.  I still get requests from security professionals to email my Social Security Number.  If you're not particularly technical, trust me, none of these are good things.

The distance between these two realities has got me thinking about all the places that these two technological castes will be competing to set legal standards.  For example, does a "time is of the essence clause" apply the perception of time of a blackberry owner or a person without a laptop?   

As the new administration provides the first coordinated national focus on technology, I'd like to add this to the list.  Perhaps the new national CTO (yet to be appointed) could work with the American Bar Association and other leaders to identify a rational strategy for standards setting in such a technologically bifurcated society.

 

 

 

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Accountability Appliances: What Lawyers Expect to See - Part III (User Interface)

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Tue, Apr 01, 2008 @ 14:04 PM

Tags: technology implementing law

In cleaning up blog tags today, I realize that I never posted part III of this discussion.  It's been posted at my MIT blog but for completeness I'm posting it here.  It's decidedly more technical than most of what's here but may be interesting for those following the thread of building technology to implement law.

--------------------------------------

I've written in the last two blogs about how lawyers operate in a very structured enviroment. This will have a tremendous impact on what they'll consider acceptable in a user interface. They might accept something which seems a bit like an outline or a form, but years of experience tell me that they will rail at anything code-like.

For example, we see

:MList a rdf:List

and automatically read

"MList" is the name of a list written in rdf

Or,

air:pattern {
:MEMBER air:in :MEMBERLIST.


and know that we are asking our system to look for a pattern in the data in which a particular "member" is in a particular list of members. Perhaps because law is already learning to read, speak, and think in another language, most lawyers look at lines like those above and see no meaning.

Our current work-in-progress produces output that includes:

bjb reject bs non compliant with S9Policy 1

Because

phone record 2892 category HealthInformation

Justify

bs request instruction bs request content

type Request

bs request content intended beneficiary customer351

type Benefit Action Instruction

customer351 location MA

xphone record 2892 about customer351

Nearly every output item is a hotlink to something which provides definition, explanation, or derivation. Much of it is in "Tabulator", the cool tool that aggregates just the bits of data we want to know.

From a user-interface-for-lawyers perspective, this version of output is an improvement over our earlier ones because it removes a lot of things programmers do to solve computation challenges. It removes colons and semi-colons from places they're not commonly used in English (i.e., as the beginning of a term) and mostly uses words that are known in the general population. It also parses "humpbacks" - the programmers' traditional
concatenation of a string of words - back into separate words. And, it replaces hyphens and underlines - also used for concatenation - with blank spaces.

At last week's meeting, we talked about the possibility of generating output which simulates short English sentences. These might be stilted but would be most easily read by lawyers. Here's my first attempt at the top-level template:

 

Issue: Whether the transactions in [TransactionLogFilePopularName] {about [VariableName] [VariableValue]} comply with [MasterPolicyPopularName]?

Rule: To be compliant, [SubPolicyPopularName] of [MasterPolicyPopularName] requires [PatternVariableName] of an event to be [PatternValue1].

Fact: In transaction [TransactionNumber] [PatternVariableName] of the event was [PatternValue2].

Analysis: [PatternValue2] is not [PatternValue].

Conclusion: The transactions appear to be non-compliant with [SubPolicyName] of [MasterPolicyPopularName].


This seems to me approximately correct in the context of requests for the appliance to reason over millions of transactions with many sub-rules. A person seeking an answer from the system would create the Issue question. The Issue question is almost always going to ask whether some series of transactions violated a super-rule and often will have a scope limiter (e.g., in regards to a particular person or within a date scope or by one entity), denoted here by {}.

From the lawyer perspective, the interesting part of the result is the finding of non-compliance or possible non-compliance. So, the remainder of the output would be generated to describe only the failure(s) in a pattern-matching for one or more sub-rules. If there's more than one violation, the interface would display the Issue once and then the Rule to Conclusion steps for each non-compliant result.

I tried this out on a laywer I know. He insisted it was unintelligible when the []'s were left in but said it was manageable when he saw the same text without them.


For our Scenario 9, Transaction 15, an idealized top level display would say:


Issue: Whether the transactions in Xphone's Customer Service Log about Person Bob Same comply with MA Disability Discrimination Law?

Rule: To be compliant, Denial of Service Rule of MA Disability Discrimination Law requires reason of an event to be other than disability.

Fact: In transaction Xphone Record 2892 reason of the event was Infectious Disease.

Analysis: Infectious disease is not other than disability.

Conclusion: The transactions appear to be non-compliant with Denial of Service Rule of MA Disability Discrimination Law.


Each one of the bound values should have a hotlink to a Tabulator display that provides background or details.

 

Right now, we might be able to produce:


Issue: Whether the transactions in Xphone's Customer Service Log about Betty JB reject Bob Same comply with MA Disability Discrimination Law?

Rule: To be non-compliant, Denial of Service Rule of MA Disability Discrimination Law requires REASON of an event to be category Health Information.

Fact: In transaction Xphone Record 2892 REASON of the event was category Health Information.

Analysis: category Health Information is category Health Information.

Conclusion: The transactions appear to be non-compliant with Denial of Service Rule of MA Disability Discrimination Law.

 

This example highlights a few challenges.

1) It's possible that only failures of policies containing comparative matches (e.g., :v1 sameAs :v2; :v9 greaterThan :v3; :v12 withinDateRange :v4) are legally relevant. This needs more thought.

2) We'd need to name every sub-policy or have a default called UnnamedSubPolicy.

3) We'd need to be able to translate statute numbers to popular names and have a default instruction to include the statute number when no popular name exists.

4) We'd need some taxonomies (e.g., infectious disease is a sub-class of disability).

5) In a perfect world, we'd have some way to trigger a couple alternative displays. For example, it would be nice to be able to trigger one of two rule structures: either one that says a rule requires a match or one that says a rules requires a non-match. The reason for this is that if we always have to use the same structure, about half of the outputs will be very stilted and cause the lawyers to struggle to understand.

6) We need someway to deal with something the system can't reason. If the law requires the reason to be disability and the system doesn't know whether health information is the same as or different from disability, then it ought to be able to produce an analysis that says something along the lines of "The relationship between Health Information and disability is unknown" and produce a conclusion that says "Whether the transaction is compliant is unknown." If we're reasoning over millions of transactions there are likely to be quite a few of these and they ought to be presented after the non-compliant ones.


 

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Accountability Appliances: What Lawyers Expect to See - Part II (Structure)

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Thu, Jan 10, 2008 @ 15:01 PM

Tags: technology implementing law

This blog was originally posted by me as part of the Breadcrumbs blog at MIT's Decentralized Information Group:

"Building accountability appliances involves a challenging intersection between business, law, and technology. In my first blog about how to satisfy the legal portion of the triad, I explained that - conceptually - the lawyer would want to know whether particular digital transactions had complied with one or more rules. Lawyers, used to having things their own way, want more... they want to get the answer to that question in a particular structure.

All legal cases are decided using the same structure. As first year law students, we spend a year with highlighter in hand, trying to pick out the pieces of that structure from within the torrent of words of court decisions. Over time, we become proficient and -- like the child who stops moving his lips when he reads -- the activity becomes internalized and instinctive. From then on, we only notice that something's not right by its absence.

The structure is as follows:

* ISSUE - the legal question that is being answered. Most typically it begins with the word "whether" "Whether the Privacy Act was violated?" Though the bigger question is whether an entire law was violated, because laws tend to have so many subparts and variables, we often frame a much narrower issue based upon a subpart that we think was violated, such as "Whether the computer matching prohibition of the Privacy Act was violated?"

* RULE - provides the words and the source of the legal requirement. This can be the statement of a particular law, such as "The US Copyright law permits unauthorized use of copyrighted work based upon four conditions - the nature of use, the the nature of the work, the amount of the work used, and the likely impact on the value of the work. 17 USC § 107." Or, it can be a rule created by a court to explain how the law is implemented in practical situations: "In our jurisdiction, there is no infringement of a copyrighted work when the original is distributed widely for free because there is no diminution of market value. Field v. Google, Inc., 412 F. Supp 2d. 1106 (D.Nev. 2006)." [Note: The explanation of the citation formats for the sources has filled books and blogs. Here's a good brief explanation from Cornell.]

* FACTS - the known or asserted facts that are relevant to the rule we are considering and the source of the information. In a Privacy Act computer matching case, there will be assertions like "the defendant's CIO admitted in deposition that he matched the deadbeat dads list against the welfare list and if there were matches he was to divert the benefits to the custodial parent." In a copyright case fair use case, a statement of facts might include "plaintiff admitted that he has posted the material on his website and has no limitations on access or copying the work."

* ANALYSIS - is where the facts are pattern-matched to the rule. "The rule does not permit US persons to lose benefits based upon computer matched data unless certain conditions are met. Our facts show that many people lost their welfare benefits after the deadbeat data was matched to the welfare rolls without any of the other conditions being met." Or "There can be no finding of copyright infringement where the original work was so widely distributed for free that it had no market value. Our facts show that Twinky Co. posted its original material on the web on its own site and every other site where it could gain access without any attempt to control copying or access."

* CONCLUSION - whether a violation has or has not occurred. "The computer matching provision of the Privacy Act was violated." or "The copyright was not infringed.

In light of this structure, we've been working on parsing the tremendous volume of words into their bare essentials so that they can be stored and computed to determine whether certain uses of data occurred in compliance with law. Most of our examples have focused on privacy.

Today, the number of sub-rules, elements of rules, and facts are often so voluminous that there is not enough time for a lawyer or team of lawyers to work through them all. So, the lawyer guesses what's likely to be a problem and works from there; the more experienced or talented the lawyer, the more likely that the guess leads to a productive result. Conversely, this likely means that many violations are never discovered. One of the great benefits of our proposed accountability appliance is that it could quickly reason over a massive volume of sub-rules, elements, and facts to identify the transactiions that appear to violate a rule or for which there's insufficient information to make a determination.

Although we haven't discussed it, I think there also will be a benefit to be derived from all of the reasoning that concludes that activities were compliant. I'm going to try to think of some high value examples.

 

 

Two additional blogs are coming:

Physically, what does the lawyer expect to see? At the simplest level, lawyers are expecting to see things in terms they recognize and without unfamiliar distractions; even the presence of things like curly brackets or metatags will cause most to insist that the output is unreadable. Because there is so much information, visualization tools present opportunities for presentations that will be intuitively understood.

And:

The 1st Lawyer to Programmer/Programmer to Lawyer Dictionary! Compliance, auditing, privacy, and a host of other topics now have lawyers and system developers interacting regularly. As we've worked on DIG, I've noticed how the same words (e.g., rules, binding, fact) have different meanings."



 

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Accountability Appliances: What Lawyers Expect to See - Part I (Concept)

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Tue, Jan 08, 2008 @ 23:01 PM

Tags: technology implementing law

This blog was originally posted by me as part of the Breadcrumbs blog at MIT's Decentralized Information Group:

 

Just before the holidays, Tim suggested I blog about "what lawyers expect to see" in the context of our accountability appliances projects. Unfortunately, being half-lawyer, my first response is that maddening answer of all lawyers - "it depends." And, worse, my second answer is - "it depends upon what you mean by 'see'". Having had a couple of weeks to let this percolate, I think I can offer some useful answers.

Conceptually, what does the lawyer expect to see? The practice of law has a fundamental dichotomy. The law is a world of intense structure -- the minutae of sub-sub-sub-parts of legal code, the precise tracking of precedents through hundreds of years of court decisions, and so on. But, the lawyers valued most highly are not those who are most structured. Instead, it is those who are most creative at manipulating the structure -- conjuring compelling arguments for extending a concept or reading existing law with just enough of a different light to convince others that something unexpected supersedes something expected. In our discussions, we have concluded that an accountability appliance we build now should address the former and not the latter.

For example, a lawyer could ask our accountability appliance if a single sub-rule had been complied with: "Whether the federal Centers for Disease Control was allowed to pass John Doe's medical history from its Epidemic Investigations Case Records system to a private hospital under the Privacy Act Routine Use rules for that system?" Or, he could ask a question which requires reasoning over many rules. Asking "Whether the NSA's data mining of telephone records is compliant with the Privacy Act?" would require reasoning over the nearly thirty sub-rules contained within the Privacy Act and would be a significant technical accomplishment. Huge numbers of hours are spent to answer these sorts of questions and the automation of the more linear analysis would make it possible to audit vastly higher numbers of transactions and to do so in a consistent manner.

If the accountability appliance determined that a particular use was non-compliant, the lawyer could not ask the system to find a plausible exception somewhere in all of law. That would require reasoning, prioritizing, and de-conflicting over possibly millions of rules -- presenting challenges from transcribing all the rules into process-able structure and creating reasoning technology that can efficiently process such a volume. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is the ability to analogize. The great lawyer draws from everything he's ever seen or heard about to assimilate into the new situation to his client's benefit. I believe that some of the greatest potential of the semantic web is in the ability to make comparisons -- I've been thinking about a "what's it like?" engine -- but this sort of conceptual analogizing seems still a ways in the future.

 

Stay tuned for two additional blogs:

Structurally, what does the lawyer expect to see? The common law (used in the UK, most of its former colonies, including the US federal system, and most of US states) follows a standard structure for communicating. Whether a lawyer is writing a motion or a judge is writing a decision, there is a structure embedded within all of the verbiage. Each well-formed discussion includes five parts: issue, rule, fact, analysis, and conclusion.

Physically, what does the lawyer expect to see? At the simplest level, lawyers are expecting to see things in terms they recognize and without unfamiliar distractions; even the presence of things like curly brackets or metatags will cause most to insist that the output is unreadable. Because there is so much information, visualization tools present opportunities for presentations that will be intuitively understood.

And:

The 1st Lawyer to Programmer/Programmer to Lawyer Dictionary! Compliance, auditing, privacy, and a host of other topics now have lawyers and system developers interacting regularly. As we've worked on DIG, I've noticed how the same words (e.g., rules, binding, fact) have different meanings.


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Digital Rights, Copyright Enforcement, and a Proposed Compromise

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Sun, Dec 30, 2007 @ 11:12 AM

Tags: technology implementing law, DRM, digital rights, copyright

Music piracy, movie piracy, tv piracy ... we see it in the news all the time. Yesterday's New York Times carried another article about the long-standing battle between major media entities and customers, with the privacy advocacy community weighing in.

The standard arguments go like this:

Media - We own the copyrights. We're only selling you one copy. You're stealing royalties from the artist when you make a copy and give it to your friends and family.

Customer - I bought it. I own it. There are lots of times I can legally share it. No one stops me from copying or lending any book I've bought.

Privacy - We respect media's copyright, but they're overreaching and unnecessarily capturing personal information as part of their attempted solution.

The reality is somewhere in between:

Some of the media's efforts to solve their problem have involved a) locking down the technology to preclude any copying and b) affixing everyone's personal information to the item to facilitate making infringement cases later. Commonly known as "digital rights management" (DRM) they tend to be more "total control' than "management." And, typicaly, these solutions swing the pendulum well past the bounds of traditional copyright law.

The customers aren't entirely in bounds either. Every copy shop I've ever seen will ask for signed permission from the copyright holder if you try to copy chapters or more from a book. And, even the most honest-minded folks tend to forget about the copyright rules at times. Years ago, I was at a dinner where the most otherwise law abiding woman in her 70s asked who wanted her to make them copies of some recent popular movies. (And, I was working for the FBI at the time!) So, some sort of protective action isn't wholly unwarranted.

My proposed compromise:

That dinner has stayed in my mind as the debate has raged and, recently, I had to tackle the question for a small start-up. Since intensively technical solutions were beyond the scope of the budget, I decided to adopt a web analogy to the FBI seal and warning ... a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear.

When a customer purchases the start-up's audio recordings they will get a very short "terms and conditions" statement:

When you buy ONE copy:

PERMITTED
Copies on all your personal devices - your PC, your iPOD, etc.
OR
Giving it to ONE person and deleting your copy
OR
Anything permitted under copyright laws

NOT PERMITTED
Giving, loaning, selling, etc. to more than one person

If you violate copyright law, you could be convicted of a crime and/or ordered by a court to pay money for the damages caused.

This is short enough and in large enough font that more customers will read it and not just skip to the "I accept these terms" button.  If my beta tests show they're still not reading it, I'll probably code the window so it sits on the screen for 15 seconds, the time it would take to read it out loud.

For those with the massive budgets of the major media companies, the product could be embedded with or wrapped in code that forced a pop up of the terms and conditions each time a copy or transfer was directed.  For those who want more, the five traditionally permissible uses of copyright material could be explained and/or the the copy owner asked whether his reasons are among them.  

I know that this is not a perfect solution or a technically non-trivial one.  But, perhaps it swings the pendulum more to the center.  And, as the old adage says, a good compromise is one in which neither party is completely satisfied.  


 

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Thesis: Data Mining Email for Compliance (Using Enron as an Example)

Posted by K Krasnow Waterman on Sat, Jun 17, 2006 @ 11:06 AM

Tags: technology implementing law, technology for lawyers, technology for business managers

I finished my thesis on May 15, 2006.  Here's the abstract: 

"I propose the creation of a real-time compliance “bot” – software to momentarily pause
each employee’s email at the moment of sending and to electronically assess whether that
email is likely to create liability or unanticipated expense for the corporation. My thesis
describes the confluence of historical events making such a product necessary and
desirable – increase in corporate regulation, explosive growth of email, acceptance of
email as evidence in litigation. The cautionary tale of Enron provides the backdrop for the
thesis. The government released hundreds of thousands of Enron management emails and
they have become research fodder for those interested in “Knowledge Discovery,” a
computer science discipline that gleans meaningful information from data otherwise
indecipherable due to its sheer size. CEO’s and other C-level corporate managers are my
intended audience, so I have attempted to counter the weightiness of the technical topics by
focusing on the search for readily understandable management headaches such as the loss
of productivity due to high participation in the fantasy football pool or the potential for
dirty jokes to become evidence in an employment law claim."

If you would like a copy of my thesis (described below) please send me an email at

kkw_at_mit_dot_edu


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