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."

Comments

Settings

[mfh]

I would like a prefs setting that goes something like:

• Idiot proof : no EULAs needed. I only want freely available stuff.
  
• Some legal crap allowed : we will allow some EULAs if they validate to XYZ standards
• Most legal crap allowed : pretty much anything goes, as long as it validates to some standard or another
• Nearly Wide Open : I will pretend that I only speak pig latin if they catch me on some bogus contractual agreement or copyright infringement. Iay eekspay igpay atinlay!
• Spyware bait : I have "I'm a sucker" tatooed on my forehead. All Nigerians are my friends and I must help them save their fortunes from the evil tyrany of Nigeria!

Before you'd have a real Robolawyer...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they would have to develop a mechanical hand that could pick your pocket.

Do you think it is a good idea?

[darth_MALL]

Hmmmm. If they end up with a product that works as hit-and-miss as Babelfish, wouldn't that jeopordize the correct translation of legalese? Are you still bound to the original mumbo-jumbo if you only understood a flawed translation? Doesn't seem feasable. Why not just dumb down the actual legal language?

Re:Do you think it is a good idea?

[WormholeFiend]

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?

Re:Do you think it is a good idea?

[eln]

Lawyers drawing up contracts tend to go out of their way to make things as precise as possible. Lawyers hate leaving unintended loopholes, so they bend over backwards to try and make sure they don't happen. This is why there's usually so much redundance in legal filings.

However, in the process of making things as precise as possible, they often make things very difficult to understand, and ironically the stuff they put in to make things very precise may end up not being interpreted as intended, because it's so hard for a third party to understand.

Of course, when a contract stretches into a hundred pages of overly precise legalese, even the lawyer who wrote it might glaze over a little bit while re-reading it, and miss all of the unintentionally misleading or confusing pieces.

There is a movement in the legal profession these days to make things more readable, but try as they might, lawyers still usually get caught up in the overwhelming need for absolute precision, and things end up being unreadable by the average person.

There's also the fact that every time you try to dumb something down to more common language, you risk losing a lot of the nuance of the original language, and can often produce a document that is interpreted very differently than the original, even though the words might technically have the same meanings.

Proper Response

[Cajunator]

Just as long as Robolawyer started his response with : "IANAL, but...."

so will I need another robolawyer

[deathcloset]

to expain the first robolawyer's EULA?

Simpler solution

[LastToKnow]

I'd prefer it if we just required companies to add summaries to their legal aggreements. Like a little bit at the top that says thing like

* You're not allowed to re-sell this software
* We can use our update feature to install whatever we want on your computer
* Your soul belongs to us

Followed by all the legal mumbo jumbo required to make it all hold up in a court.

Re:Perfect for a HAL system

[mfh]

"I am sorry Dave. I cannot allow you to agreee to this agreement."
"Hal...!!! Open the webpage HAL!"
"I'm sorry Dave, it has a Nigerian scam on it."
"Hal!!! It's not a Nigerian scam. It's President Bush's campaign page. I need to read about his views for the big election. Since you wouldn't let me read CNN, this is my next option."
"I'm sorry, Dave, but the answer is still, No."

The obvious question?

[scribblej]

My first thought is, if you have a peice of software "signing" these EULAs for you -- who's bound by the "contract?"

Natrual language parsing is hard enough for humans

[RealAlaskan]

I don't see a browser plugin doing a good job of it.

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.

armchair lawyer thoughts

[fred fleenblat]

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.

Re:Infospace already owns this IP

[serutan]

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.

Re:Solution to EULAs

[3terrabyte]

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