Articles
I like Derek Slater's recent DMCA article pretty well, and Matthew Skala's "Colour" essay, and had a great time with Cory Doctorow's entertaining Microsoft DRM speech. If you follow copyright law, or even if you don't, I think it will reward you to read all three.
Skala's "What Colour are your bits?" is particularly interesting for its partial theory of a cultural misunderstanding between lawyers and computer scientists. I would like to see it further elaborated. I've already heard one lawyer praise it strongly for its attempt at showing why you can't "hack the law"; one of the key concepts in legal reasoning is intent, something computer people have practically made taboo after the conspicuous failures of artificial intelligence. But it's true -- it's just one way in which lawyers and judges reason about mental states and not merely properties of communication channels.
A lot of computer people have wished that the law worked more like a computer program (in Skala's metaphor, that it would try to dispense with Colour). Thus we have Smart Contracts, for example, and various ideas about formalizing legal requirements in some sort of formal language (like XML or Scheme). In some sense this is closely akin to the famous ideal of Leibniz:
In other words, it must be brought about that every fallacy becomes nothing other than a calculating error, and every sophism expressed in this new type of notation becomes in fact nothing other than a grammatical or linguistic error, easily proved to be such by the very laws of this philosophical grammar.Once this has been achieved, when controversies arise, there will be no more need for a disputation between two philosophers than there would be between two accountants. It would be enough for them to pick up their pens and sit at their abacuses, and say to each other (perhaps having summoned a mutual friend): "Let us calculate."
Formalizing contracts may actually achieve this -- within the limits of those pre-existing agreements that can be put into the form of formal contracts, but not with regard to other kinds of "controversies" (whether legal or philosophical or factual). However, one lawyer points out that Smart Contracts and a more general family of formalized agreements work without human intervention only where there is no subject of the contract that requires human judgment: for example, a contract for services almost always necessarily involves some sort of human judgment about whether the services were properly performed. And lawyers shock technologists by actually liking some areas of ambiguity in the law -- for example, almost all the lawyers I know think that the ambiguity of the concept of "fair use" in 17 USC 107, leading to a subjective fact-based case-by-case analysis and evolving caselaw, is actually preferable to a legislative enumeration of user rights in copyright (which some other countries, like Australia and parts of Europe, have adopted). It's probably easy to find other examples and raging arguments over whether the ambiguity has actually led to something desirable: but lawyers believe it does and don't see anything unusual about that.
And Cory's speech is a good time: colorful (not Colourful), sparkling.
