Legislation 2.0: Government of Greece

The government of Greece has begun to make draft legislation available for public comment on its Website, opengov.gr. Professor Ioannis Iglezakis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Law School provides background information and commentary on his Information Law blog.

Susskind & Cooper on Legal Services Outsourcing at Rio Tinto

Legal Week has published a video of a very interesting discussion between Dr. Richard Susskind and Leah Cooper, Rio Tinto’s Managing Attorney, of Rio Tinto‘s June 2009 decision to outsource certain of its legal services to the outsourcing firm CPA Global.

The discussion discloses much interesting information about Rio Tinto’s motivations for outsourcing, and about the details of its outsourcing arrangement, particularly respecting quality control.

The potential implications for law firms and legal education, of this kind of outsourcing arrangement seem quite substantial. Rio Tinto’s use of outsourcing seems consistent with the trends identified by Dr. Susskind in his 2008 book, The End of Lawyers?. (See background and commentary on the book here.)

Legal services outsourcing is relevant to legal informatics because such outsourcing is a key context for legal information processing, and often involves the use or development of new legal information technologies.

HT @complexd.

Panel: Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics

[NOTE: Updated on 5 December 2009 to link to audio and video of the panel, and links to resources on robotics & law.]

A panel entitled Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics will be held November 12, 2009 at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California, USA. Click here for audio and video of the panel. Here is a description of the topic:

“Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.”

Panelists:

• Kenneth Anderson, Professor of Law, American University; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University
• Paul Saffo, Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University; Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X; Columnist, ABCNews.com
• F. Daniel Siciliano, Faculty Director, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance; Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Programs, Stanford Law School

Moderator: M. Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow, Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The event is co-Sponsored by Stanford’s Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance and the Stanford Program in Law Science and Technology‘s Center for Computers and Law (CodeX).

For more information, please see the announcement.

Click here for links to resources on robotics and law.

HT @legalgeekery & @montserratlj.

Su et al. on Patent Priority Network: Linking Patent Portfolio to Strategic Goals

Fang Pei Su, of the Shu-Te University Department of Logistics Management, and colleagues, have published Patent Priority Network: Linking Patent Portfolio to Strategic Goals, 60 Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2353 (Nov. 2009). Here is the abstract:

“When applying for patents, companies should consider performing patent portfolios as a means of integrating their patent strategy to shape their overall business strategy. This is an important issue for any company in pursuit of enhanced operational performance because the whole raison d’être behind the application of patents is the anticipation of achieving maximum competitive advantage. A prerequisite for such a company is a decision analysis model of patent portfolios because this has the added advantage of being readily applicable to the evaluation of the quality of its competitors’ portfolios; thus, by understanding both itself and its competitors, a company can attain a superior position. To demonstrate this, we examine patent priority networks (PPNs) formed through patent family members and claimed priority patents, performing a model of patent portfolio analysis and then going on to determine the algorithms. We suggest that information retrieved from this network can provide a useful reference tool for decision-making by company CEOs, CTOs, R&D managers, and intellectual property managers.”

Roitblat et al. on Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery

Herbert L. Roitblat, Anne Kershaw, & Patrick Oot, all of the Electronic Discovery Institute, have published Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery: Computer Classification vs. Manual Review, forthcoming in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Here is the abstract:

“In litigation in the US, the parties are obligated to produce to one another, when requested, those documents that are potentially relevant to issues and facts of the litigation (called discovery). As the volume of electronic documents continues to grow, the expense of dealing with this obligation threatens to surpass the amounts at issue and the time to identify these relevant documents can delay a case for months or years. The same holds true for government investigations and third-parties served with subpoenas. As a result, litigants are looking for ways to reduce the time and expense of discovery. One approach is to supplant or reduce the traditional means of having people, usually attorneys, read each document, with automated procedures that use information retrieval and machine categorization to identify the relevant documents. This study compared an original categorization, obtained as part of a response to a Department of Justice Request and produced by having one or more of 225 attorneys review each document with automated categorization systems provided by two legal service providers. The goal was to determine whether the automated systems could categorize documents at least as well as human reviewers could, thereby saving time and expense. The results support the idea that machine categorization is no less accurate at identifying relevant/responsive documents than employing a team of reviewers. Based on these results, it would appear that using machine categorization can be a reasonable substitute for human review.”

Background information about this study is available here.

Legal & Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web

A tutorial on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web is being held October 25, 2009, in conjunction with ISWC 2009: The International Semantic Web Conference. Among the topics addressed in the tutorial is the marking up of rights statements and waivers as Linked Data. Some slides from the tutorial are available here.

Grosvenor & Seaborne on Using Hybrid Search & Query for E-Discovery Identification

David Grosvenor & Andy Seaborne, both of HP Laboratories, have posted Using Hybrid Search & Query for E-Discovery Identification (July 6, 2009) (HPL-2009-155). They are scheduled to present this paper on October 28, 2009, in the Semantic Web in Use Track at ISWC 2009: International Semantic Web Conference 2009. Here is the abstract:

“We investigated the use of a hybrid search and query for locating
enterprise data relevant to a requesting party’s legal case (e-discovery identification). We extended the query capabilities of SPARQL with search capabilities to provide integrated access to structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sources. Every data source in the enterprise is potentially within the scope of E-discovery Identification. So we use some common enterprise structured data sources that provide product and organizational information to guide the search and restrict it to a manageable scale. We use hybrid search and query to conduct a rich high-level search, which identifies the key people and products to coarsely locate relevant data-sources. Furthermore the product and organizational data sources are also used to increase recall which is a key requirement for e-discovery Identification.”

Cheddad et al. on a Self-Embedding Algorithm to Combat Digital Document Forgery

Abbas Cheddad, Professor Joan Condell, and colleagues, all of the University of Ulster at Magee School of Computing and Intelligent Systems have published A Secure and Improved Self-Embedding Algorithm to Combat Digital Document Forgery, forthcoming in 89 Signal Processing 2324 (Dec. 2009). Here is the abstract:

“The recent digital revolution has facilitated communication, data portability and on-the-fly manipulation. Unfortunately, this has brought along some critical security vulnerabilities that put digital documents at risk. The problem is in the security mechanism adopted to secure these documents by means of encrypted passwords; however, this security shield does not actually protect the documents which are stored intact. We propose here a solution to this real world problem through a 1D hash algorithm coupled with 2D iFFT (irreversible Fast Fourier Transform) to encrypt digital documents in the 2D spatial domain. Further by applying an imperceptible information hiding technique we can add another security layer which is resistant to noise and to a certain extent JPEG compression. We support this assertion by showing a practical example which is drawn from our set of experiments. This work exploits Jarvis’ kernel to generate the error diffusion signal and the Wavelet-based Inverse Halftoning via De-convolution (WInHD) to recover the approximation of the original signal. Our method not only points out forgery but also allows legal or forensics expert gain access to the original document despite being manipulated. This would undoubtedly be very useful in cases of disputes or claims.”

Yücel & Özgüler on Watermarking via Zero Assigned Filter Banks

Zeynep Yücel & Professor A. Bülent Özgüler, both of the Bilkent University Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, have published Watermarking via Zero Assigned Filter Banks, forthcoming in 90 Signal Processing 467 (Feb. 2010). Here is the abstract:

“In order to identify the owner and distributor of digital data, a watermarking scheme in frequency domain for multimedia files is proposed. The scheme satisfies the imperceptibility and persistence requirements and it is robust against additive noise. It consists of a few stages of wavelet decomposition of several subblocks of the original signal using special zero assigned filter banks. By assigning zeros to filters on the high frequency portion of the spectrum, filter banks with frequency selective response are obtained. The information is then inserted in the wavelet-decomposed and compressed signal. Several robustness tests are performed on male voice, female voice, and music files, color and gray level images. The algorithm is tested under white Gaussian noise and against JPEG compression and it is observed to be robust even when exposed to high levels of corruption.”

Watts et al. on Software for Optimal Conservation Based Land- & Sea-Use Zoning

Matthew E. Watts, of the University of Queensland, The Ecology Center, School of Biological Sciences and Centre for Applied Environmental Decision Analysis, Dr. Ian R. Ball, of the Australian Antarctic Division, and colleagues, have published Short Communication: Marxan with Zones: Software for Optimal Conservation Based Land- & Sea-Use Zoning, forthcoming in 24 Environmental Modelling & Software 1513 (Dec. 2009). Here is the abstract:

“Marxan is the most widely used conservation planning software in the world and is designed for solving complex conservation planning problems in landscapes and seascapes. In this paper we describe a substantial extension of Marxan called Marxan with Zones, a decision support tool that provides land-use zoning options in geographical regions for biodiversity conservation. We describe new functions designed to enhance the original Marxan software and expand on its utility as a decision support tool. The major new element in the decision problem is allowing any parcel of land or sea to be allocated to a specific zone, not just reserved or unreserved. Each zone then has the option of its own actions, objectives and constraints, with the flexibility to define the contribution of each zone to achieve targets for pre-specified features (e.g. species or habitats). The objective is to minimize the total cost of implementing the zoning plan while ensuring a variety of conservation and land-use objectives are achieved. We outline the capabilities, limitations and additional data requirements of this new software and perform a comparison with the original version of Marxan. We feature a number of case studies to demonstrate the functionality of the software and highlight its flexibility to address a range of complex spatial planning problems. These studies demonstrate the design of multiple-use marine parks in both Western Australia and California, and the zoning of forest use in East Kalimantan.”