Attorney Sues Website Over His Online Rating

An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that a local attorney is suing legal startup Avvo over a rating that was algorithmically assigned. The story covers the controversy of computers grading humans. 'Browne, who has participated in a number of high-profile cases in the state, including the defense of arsonist Martin Pang, said in an interview that Avvo is being irresponsible with the ratings and called them a fraud. And he questioned why Supreme Court justices and prominent lawyers score so low. Three other attorneys interviewed by the P-I also expressed doubts about the rating system, while News.com reported that the site "seemed to be riddled with bizarre errors."' Such practices are not new: the New York Times earlier this year reported on Google using algorithms to determine applicant suitability. But what happens when you don't like the result? Can a computer program be considered defamatory?"

Comments

Just another tool.

[Harmonious Botch]

From TFA:

Can a computer program be considered defamatory?" Programs can not be defamatory. Their output may be.

If I use a hand-held calculator to get a result, and then publish it and that publication defames someone, I can't blame it on the calculator.
In this case, a computer is just another tool used to calculate something - perhaps a tool that many people don't understand as well as they should - but a tool nonetheless.
You use it, you take responsibility for the results. You don't understand how it works? Hire a consultant. The fact that it is a complex tool does not excuse you if you libel someone.

( NB: The above paragraphs presume that there is indeed libel, a fact not yet proven.)

Re:Just another tool.

[pimpimpim]

As far as I understood it, a person is rated by a website with some rating procedure the website worked out. So your example doesn't really hold. Someone else used a method on the calculator to calculate the result, and he complains about the method.

I don't know what to think of this. As a restaurant, you can earn michelin stars based on the grades you get from probably several testers. Did you ever hear of a restaurant that sued michelin for loosing a star? It doesn't seem to make sense.

Rmember, any person, magazine, or website can grade services, but they will only be taken seriously when they have a decent method. Systems like this work when not only the public has faith in the method, but also the people involved (e.g. the chefs), respect the way the testing was done. If restaurants would think that the michelin system is fake, they wouldn't be proud of their stars in the first place.

Since there seems to be quite a group of people that do not agree with the method used by that website, they can of course try to sue them, but I figure that the website will be rendered useless within the trade fast enough that they might as well just ignore the score of the website all together. Sueing might even be counterproductive, I didn't know before that the website existed in the first place. And I think he has very much the right to do so. He never asked to be rated, but at the same time the rating will be of high economic importance to him (getting more high-profile jobs, etc.). Now you could compare this with a restaurant getting the famous michelin stars, it can make or brake the restaurant. Now In cases like that, you need to be able to ask for a second opinion.

Re:Just another tool.

[Sancho]

I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Can you guess what it is? Give up? It's my Pagerank score, and mine happens to be 86.

That's what this situation reminds me of. Credit scores (which is what the above lines reference) are calculated by an algorithm, and they can be wrong. If they are, you can get the company to adjust them, provided that you can provide evidence that their input is faulty. I see no reason that this case should be any different, provided the inputs (reasons for the ranking) are well known.

In the case of Google, however, they are providing a ranking rather than a rating. It is much, much harder to objectively rank webpage relevance based on search terms, and even harder to know whether a given ranking is justified when you don't even know the algorithm used.

Re:Just another tool.

[QuietLagoon]

Programs can not be defamatory. Their output may be.

I disagree. Programs are merely an extension of the human(s) who designed them, the program does what the human(s) told them to do. Therefore what a program does is the full responsibility of the human who designed it.

I always laugh when a programmer tells me, "there's a bug in my program." My first questions is always, "well, who put that bug there?" Programmers talk of bugs as if they just magically appear, and are not the result of the programmer's error(s).

The comment that programs cannot be defamatory smacks as specious at best. Of course, programs can be defamatory. Programs are written by humans, programs are computerized extensions of humans.

Re:Just another tool.

[SnowZero]

Agreed. You can encode whatever you want into an algorithm, and it can certainly be biased and even illegal. For example, in some applicant rating system for a hiring "screen" program, if you have:

if(applicant.sex == female) rating = 0.0;

That would certainly violate equal opportunity laws, unless the company could prove that the output of said program was not used at all.

Defamatory?

[piojo]

Well, if they made it clear to viewers how their ratings are calculated, they should not be responsible for harm done. In that case they would just be stating facts (e.g., rating = this lawyer wins X% of his cases - this lawyer charges %Y percent over the industry average for their type of cases...) But if they don't tell people where the ratings come from, then I wonder: how is writing a shitty algorithm that says defamatory stuff about people any better than just saying defamatory stuff about people. People are responsible for the computer programs that they knowingly use.

Re:My Opinion?

[fyngyrz]

I suspect that you mean to say 'justices,' not 'judges.'

Yep, that'd be close, all right. Perhaps I meant injustices.

Which would be, what? The negative commerce clause?

That would be the feds marching into California and swooping down on medical marijuana users based on a commerce clause argument that 100% intrastate commerce "could be" or "could have been" interstate commerce, and so the feds claim to have jurisdiction to screw with California law, legislators, and citizens. Which they do not. The ruling and the reasoning is sophist nonsense. The constitution says in sec 8, para 1 through para 3, that The Congress shall have Power To... regulate Commerce... among the several States. That's it. No more than that. It's an enumerated power, and there is no authority implied or specified that allows mucking about with commerce internal to a state. Furthermore, the 10th amendment makes the limit explicit: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. So there you have it. They have the authority to regulate intrastate commerce, but not interstate commerce. The court is out of line, and so are the feds.

[taking property by force and coercion] Which is not a bad idea, actually; that is how governments builds roads, among other things.

That observation in no way precludes the fact that there are other ways to build roads, including ways that don't screw with people's properties at all. You can go under them; you can go around them; worst case, you can even go over them, though you certainly ought to pay for that privilege. It is wrong to steal, and it is no less wrong when the government does it.

The idea of "fair compensation" is intellectually bankrupt. If I own a piece of land, and I want to sell it, that is where it can be determined that it has a specific monetary value. The way that is done is that when you offer enough money to satisfy me, I'll let you have it.

If you don't, I won't. But if I own that property and for whatever reason, I do not want to sell it, then you cannot put a value on it that equates to "reasonable compensation." How do you compensate for my ancestors having raised generations there? How do you compensate for the view, or the fishing in my lake? How do you compensate for the fact that my brother died in that house, or that I was married there? Or that I built it by hand? Or that I lost my virginity on the living room couch?

The answer, of course, is that you can't, not that it is fair to use some number a bunch of people I didn't delegate my feelings and associations to invented based on their feelings. I'll tell you how it actually works: force and threat of force. Coercion. There isn't a reasonable step in the entire process.

So you're saying that the Constitution imposes limits on the federal government spending its money which would prohibit this? Please feel free to point them out

Sure, I'll point the problem out. It is what we call blackmail, where one party is forced to do something it does not believe is legal, ethical or otherwise proper, by another party that wields a coercive force. I'll point something else out, too: the trust the people put in the government to build and maintain a general infrastructure doesn't include the presumption that said power will be used as a weapon, nor does it include the presumption that the feds won't build roads in some states, while building in others. The collection of taxes is (barely) tolerated with the idea that said collection is done for the common good, not in order to wield a coercive force on the states. The fact that the feds do wield such coercive forces is contrary to article 1, section 8 of the