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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."
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.
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.
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.