Showing posts with label trend. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trend. Show all posts
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Trend of Legal Wikis

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Collaborative content management style enters the legal world. Not a new thing, but its becoming a trend now:

The key word in these experiments is collaboration and the engine driving them is a type of Web site known as a wiki, from the Hawaiian word for fast. A wiki allows any Web page visitor to easily add, remove or edit content.

Editing can be done quickly from within a browser and without any special knowledge of authoring formats. A wiki's simplicity and ease of use make it an ideal tool for group projects. The first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, was written in 1994. But it wasn't until recently that wikis saw broader use. No doubt, a driving force has been the best-known wiki -- the collaboratively written encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Neither are wikis new to the legal profession. Denver lawyer John DeBruyn has been experimenting with wikis as a tool for lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration since at least 1997. But in the legal world, as elsewhere, wikis have become more widely used in the last year or two.

Last year, I wrote an op-ed piece about "wikislation" and it received feedbacks from a number of enthusiast. Now, I am beginning to think that the idea to wikislate is extendable to the creation of autonomous laws, such as "code of conduct", "term of reference" or "company regulation". I just haven't come up with a viable technical mechanism in doing this.

Another idea is to draft a wiki contract. Why not draft a wiki site containing boilerplate provisions? That way the whole world can collaborate in creating a draft contract. It also saves a lot of time. Interested?

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2007 Legal Predictions: What is HOT?

Thursday, January 4, 2007

No computer as a legal subject, no determining your child using copyright, no international law on online games, we only talk about 2007 not 2030. What's going to be hot? Jennifer Granick wrote in Wired that (i) contract law and (ii) privacy law will be the two hot topics for 2007.:
Free speech and fair use don't mean much if software end user license agreements, or EULAs, or website terms of service, or TOS, can take those rights away. Contract law allows private parties to agree to forgo most rights in exchange for some privilege. Vendors of goods and services take advantage of modern contracting tools, like click-through or shrink-wrap, to impose terms and conditions on using software or websites. These documents purport to limit the user's legal rights.

Two things have changed. First, it's no longer acceptable only to catch criminals during or after a crime has been committed. Counter-terrorism requires identifying and neutralizing threats ahead of time. Second, collecting information about everyone is now much cheaper and easier than it used to be. We spread information about ourselves as we use the internet, shop online, talk on our cell phones, send e-mail or use electricity. These activities leave a digital trail that database and search technology can store and access relatively inexpensively.
Privacy has been quite a debate in 2006, both for lawyers and non lawyers. Futurist such as Brin had invented the concept of "Transparent Society"and Cascio introduced the "Participatory Panopticon". For the lawyers, Posner's books "Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform" and Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency both discusses privacy issues as an inevetable aspect of law enforcement. I think these thoughts contributes significantly to the privacy legal debate in 2007.

I agree with her analysis on online contracts. Even lawyers wouldn't bother spending time to study the content of online contracts. Thus, following this, another aspects of law will arise: consumer protection and competition law.

You can read the whole thing here.