Are you interested in articles on file sharing?

So am I. With regard to the history, I started my "career" as a researcher by examining peer-to-peer file sharing. The first article I wrote as a student during a seminar course on criminal law. My teacher asked if I was interested in publishing my seminar paper as an article and of course I was. I still remember the feeling when the article was published. The second and third article I wrote together with my co-authors in a research project funded by Nokia Research Center. During that time I worked at Helsinki Institute of Information Technology and at Aalto University. Heikki Kokkinen from Nokia Research Center defended his dissertation about the subject:

http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2010/isbn9789526034935/

Have a look at these:

An article about copyright infringements and the principle of legal certainty (Tekijänoikeusrikoksen ja rikkomuksen tunnusmerkistöt ja seuraamukset epätäsmällisyyskiellon näkökulmasta tarkasteltuna):

Tekijänoikeutta voidaan pitää tietoyhteiskunnan Magna Cartana. Tieto ja kommunikaatio ovat informaatioyhteiskunnan kehityksen edellytyksiä. Tekijänoikeus suojaa kirjallista, auditiivista ja visuaalista informaatiota ja vaikuttaa näin informaation jakeluun ja leviämiseen. Tekijänoikeuslainsäädäntö vaikuttaa nyky-yhteiskunnassa jokaisen ihmisen arkipäivään. Yksityiset ihmiset ja kansalaisjärjestöt hyödyntävät päivittäin uusia viestintäteknologioita ja lähettävät sekä vastaanottavat informaatiota ja viestejä. Tämän vuoksi tekijänoikeuslainsäädännön tulisi olla erityisen selkeää ja ymmärrettävää. Käytännössä vaatimus ei kuitenkaan toteudu. Osittaisuudistuksin kehittynyttä tekijänoikeuslainsäädäntöä luonnehditaan yleisesti mutkikkaaksi ja vaikeaselkoiseksi. http://www.edilex.fi/lakikirjasto/5923.pdf

Criminal Friends of Entertainment: Analysing Results from Recent Peer-to-Peer Surveys:

Why are people massively infringing copyright law? Do file sharers see changes in their consumption from legal sources? Do they know what they are doing is illegal or do they just not care? The problem calls for further study. We conducted a web survey and asked questions about file sharing and copyright law. This paper describes the results of that survey. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol5-1/hietanen.asp

Laila, a File Sharing Indulgence Service:

This paper analyses Laila, a new online service, which enables consumers to legalize their previous file sharing in exchange for a payment. We examine how a voluntary consumer-driven payment changes the practices and proposals related to peer-to-peer file sharing. Then we describe how Laila is helping to legalize currently illegal file sharing. http://www.nir.nu/Journal/nir-2009-2

Turing Award to Judea Pearl

Today, the Association for Computing Machinery has named Dr. Judea Pearl as the recipient of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award (ACM press release), which is widely considered as the $DYNAMITE_PRIZE of computer science. The award was given for Dr. Pearl on his work for 'Develop[ing a] Novel Framework for Reasoning under Uncertainty that Changed How Scientists Approach Real World Problems'.


I have (and have read) Pearl's two major works, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann 1988) and Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge UP 2000) and cannot praise them highly enough. Especially the first one has had an enormous impact on AI (though not so much AI & law), these days the Bayesian methods presented in it are quite simply ubiquitous and indispensable. I do have my reservations about their applicability to representing uncertainty in law, but more about that at some other time. (I have read Pearl's 1988 UCLA technical report on Non-Bayesian Formalisms for Managing Uncertainty as well, after all.) For a more sympathetic take on Bayesianism in law, see eg. Law and Truth: A Theory of Evidence by Hannu Tapani Klami, Minna Gräns, and Johanna Sorvettula (The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters 2000).


(via NYT Bits)

Technological Rationality: the Logos of Slavery or the Enabler of Human(e) Progress?

Technological development has faced criticism. The efficiency brought by industrialization and computer technology is expected to eventually lead to unpleasant outcome. The critics have developed by means of science-fiction stories about a future filled with technology. It is assumed that people stagnate and indulge only their animal desires. In the second scenario, the people become insensitive robots relying only on pure reason.

Herbert Marcuse was of the opinion that the logos of technology equals to the logos of slavery. People have become tools, even if it was thought that the technology releases persons. In his book One-dimensional Man published in 1964, Marcuse says that in the historical continuum man has been and will be the master of the other man. This is a social reality which societal changes do not affect. The basis for domination, however, has changed over the ages. Personal dependence has been replaced by an objective order of dependency, such as the dependency of a slave to the master has changed to the dependence of the economic laws and of the market. In accordance with Marcuse this higher form of rationality deprives natural and spiritual resources more efficiently and shares profits in a new way. A man can be seen as a slave in the production machinery and there is a battle of the existence in the production machinery. The battle affects with the destructive power the production machinery and its parts, such as builders and users.

Marcuse’s ideas certainly give some food for thought. And while I don’t completely agree with them. The development and use of intelligent machines face tremendous challenges in current legal systems. Technological development is stifled by liability risks. Due to both the technological limitations for perfectly functioning machines and the unpredictable cognitive element, intelligent machines are not perfect and it is almost guaranteed that there will be failures causing harm. However, this is not an excuse not to aim for failure-free operation. Instead, the inevitable failures should be managed so that present economical or legal issues do not hinder the potential human development and prosperity enabled through the adoption of new technologies. To read more about my and my co-author’s thoughts on this: http://www.njcl.utu.fi/2_2010/huttunen_anniina.pdf

Steve Fuller, New frontiers in science and technology (Polity, Cambridge 2007) 232 p

Herbert Marcuse, Yksiulotteinen ihminen: teollisen yhteiskunnan tarkastelua (W+G, Helsinki 1969) 262 p

What's this?

The title of this blog, Legal Futurology, contains a certain degree of deliberate ambiguity. You, Dear Reader, may wonder, what kind of a future we are talking about and what the law has to do it. At this point we don't expect we will be writing about futures (the financial instruments) or about future developments in the law in general, say, regarding the resolution of the financial crisis or the next EU treaty or planned directive this or statute that or what the court will (or should) decide in Rubber v. Glue or whatever. While we cannot promise to avoid such topics altogether (classic evasive move there), what we have in mind are some very specific aspects of the future and the law.

The future we are referring to is that of the William Gibson quotation 'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.' It is also that of Richard Susskind's book Future of Law*. And since at least one of us is a board-certified Legal Realist, there might be the odd dash of future in the sense of Prediction Theory thrown in as well.

More concretely, we both are researchers at the University of Helsinki working at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence. Our perspectives are quite different, as one of us (Anniina) studies AI as the object of legal regulation, whereas the other (Anna) studies AI as a tool to facilitate legal information retrieval or even do legal reasoning by itself. These complementary perspectives should open up for a broader range of topics than either one of us could do by herself. We are also planning to take advantage of this in more traditional fora through co-authored publications (stay tuned!).

Speaking of publications, we also see this blog as an opportunity to develop our research ideas in a manner better suited for a field in which the pace of technical development is so overwhelming that traditional publication-based academic discussion just doesn't cut it, especially if the ideas are slated for publication in a monograph x years from now rather than as a standalone article. We will of course also be writing about our own articles as well as interesting stuff we have read elsewhere. The style of the posts would probably not get past peer review (and anyway one can't just print out all one's blog posts and call it a dissertation, right?) but some of texts published here are bound to end up in our more serious publications more or less verbatim. To steal terminology from the software industry, we see this blog as a platform for rapid prototyping or Agile Development of our research ideas, which of course is very much in vogue these days. If you agree with what we write, we don't mind if you show it, and if you vehemently disagree with us, we would appreciate your (civil) comments even more.

Or, as put by the Agile Development guru Benjamin Cardozo:

'I sometimes think that we worry ourselves overmuch about the enduring consequences of our errors. They may work a little confusion for a time. In the end, they will be modified or corrected or their teachings ignored. The future takes care of such things. In the endless process of testing and retesting, there is a constant rejection of the dross, and a constant retention of whatever is pure and sound and fine.'#

Share and enjoy,

Anna & Anniina

* OUP 1996. You should really read his The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (OUP 2008) instead, but we couldn't possibly reuse that as a title for the blog, now could we?

# The Nature of the Judicial Process (Yale University Press 1921), p. 179