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Robolawyer to Handle Clickwraps?
adelord writes "Recently Wired published an essay by Mark D. Rasch describing the need for a 'browser-based automaton that could be adjusted to match your tolerance for legal mumbo jumbo' to help the user navigate the torrent of user agreements most of us click through without reading. Is this a job for Google Labs, and if not, who else would write the software for it? Do you think it is a good idea? While the legal exposure from writing software that partially fills the role of a lawyer could be enormous, I sure that it would have an ironclad user agreement that I would simply click through in my excitement to use it."
No spyware would play by the rules. They'd do everything they could to bypass the robo lawyer bot thingy. And how would you - as the article implies - install this software *before* you install your OS?
I don't think that lawyers themselves understand legalese properly.
Why? In the past, I've been asked to translate various contracts and agreements from English to French, and more often than not, when I talked to the alleged writer, s/he was not able to answer the question(s) I had about weird syntax/grammar that made the text basically nonsensical.
And a lot of them asked me to "keep the nonsensical part" in the resulting translation.
Incompetence or deliberate and dishonest obfuscation?
I could imagine EULAs having a ``metafield'' which would have values like: GPL, BSD, Unknown Proprietary, Not Specified. You could set your browser to click through known, approved licenses. I'm not sure that would be valuable, though; those that are generally known and widely regarded as innocuous are the ones that don't usually hassle you in the first place.
I'd rather see some effort put into enforcing the first sale doctrine, and invalidating EULAs and clickthroughs in court, myself.
See what I've been reading.
The purpose behind P3P is that it really distills the privacy down to a few multiple choice questions. Thus, there isn't a need for an army of readers - the robolawyer could automatically check the answers to the multiple choice questions... after all, those answers are machine readable.
Since the browser sends a string to the server (indicating browser type and stuff), why not include my terms in the string including "your servers response to this http request indicates your acceptance of these terms". Any response by the server then means they agree.
Actually the key to it might be getting companies to agree to a standard EULA, or a few variants of the EULA--Thus real lawyers could read it and parse it to more common terminolgy which is what the program would spit out. That would neatly solve most of the problems--assuming (a) companies would agree to submit their EULAs to whoever's writing the software, (b) that the companies agree with what the plain english version says, and (c) that companies agree not to alter the EULA once it's submitted. Thus this becomes a difficult task, but I don't think it would be impossible.
"Your thinking privleges have been revoked."
----Nicholas Cage, "Gone in 60 Seconds".
Instead of a Robolawyer how about a program that detects EULA and then opens up a new brower page that is linked to a community run website (somelike like Wikipedia, but with more security so that malware writers can't get in there and change things)
This page would display dumbed down information about the EULA that you or I could understand.
I.e:
"Crockbot2004"
This EULA would like you to agree to the following:
I will allow "Crockbot 2004" to:
1. monitor my browing and send information about it periodically to a server. This transfer will not be sanitized to remove personal information
2. download ads and display them on my computer
3. execute abitrary code and utilize my network connection
So a human would do the decyphering, the Eula-robo would simply have to fetch the information.
And then I as a user could go "Woah, I don't want to download illegal mp3s that badly!" and cancel the install.
-paridel
Let me explain myself. Above all, IANAL. But something that always puzzles me is the enphasys put in someone reading the EULA. I mean, sometimes, they actually make you scroll the EULA all the way to the bottom before letting you click the "I Accept" botton.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but if so much effort is put by the Soft. companies in the fact that you read the EULA, must be to save their asses.
Why is it that by default, the focus is in the "I do NOT Accept"? So that you don't click it automatically. Why not? So that if you ever want to complain about the EULA, the soft company can argue they did everything in their power to stop you from accepting without reading it first.
What happens if you have some program like this installed? Will they be as protected as when you read it through (scroll down)? Will you be able to argue: "I didn't know you were selling my email address!"
I'm not sure, so this isn't an authoritative comment, these are just my thoughts.
Here's my thought. Design a click through thing that just blindly accepts any legal agreement without showing it to the user. The name of the program is something like "agree to disagree". This calls into question the validity of any agreement that (a) you weren't shown and (b) did not have direct control over and (c) which you installed something to avoid dealing with.
While the company that presented the agreement will have a record of a URL hit by you with a form with a certain radio button set, when it comes time to deal with a lawsuit it won't stand up in court because the form submission was automated. To make a bizarre metaphor, if I hand a screaming monkey a rubber stamp with my name on it, I am not bound by any contracts the screaming rubber-stamp-wielding monkey accidentally stamps.
Second idea is to publish your personal conditions and email them to the company or include the URL in some form submission. Once you have a situation where your conditions conflict with theirs and the only "signatures" are form submission records, they are going to have a difficult time proving that there was an actual agreement in the legal sense of the word.
A system like this is a complex language-parsing utility that can connect its analysis of a text with a database of appropriate knowledge--legal, in this case. It must also have the ability to discriminate between levels of complexity to appropriately disclude certain information. That's the easy 90% of creating an AI. You could cut out the legal database. That's not too important. But the only other way to simplify a EULA summarization utility would be to match the pattern of each clause with a member of a predefined set of proto-clauses and parse the whole expression based on unique keywords; from that point there would be a dictionary that would instruct the utility to omit the clause or summarize it in a particular manner. The former method is much more certain than the latter, which is liable to omit clauses that you should read and display ones that don't matter. However, the latter method is more reasonable.
Sales volume is inversely proportional to EULA clarity, therefore if you make EULAs 'super' clear, you will jepodise the sales of many consumer goods. EULAs would often look something like this:
-This disk won't work with other players
-You can't use this phone on any other network
-This software may not be secure and if you loose your data its not our fault
-You cannot copy this CD, it will not work in some players
-This player will not let you skip adverts on DVDs that you have bought, you will have to watch them even though you paid
-You are not buying this disk, you are buying a license to use it, we have the right to revoke it at any time without question or refund
You see, the economy relies on sub-standard goods, buy clarifying EULAs you are screwing with the economy.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Off on a tangent, it's sad to see anyone substitute the term "IP" for "idea," It's sort of like tv people referring to places in the world as "destinations," as if they exist mainly from the travel industry's point of view. Ideas are not property and never have been. People only "hold" patents, trademarks and copyrights, which give them rights temporarily granted by the government. They never "own" anything, which is why people who infringe their rights aren't "stealing" anything. The distinction is important because thinking of ideas as property lets the rights-control industry play the part of the little old lady running after the purse snatcher. The ideas of ownership and theft are deeply ingrained in our culture. Everybody can identify with them. But they just don't apply.
Has anyone patented it yet? Seems a good thing to patent.