Kacsuk on The Mathematics of Patent Claim Analysis

Zsófia Kacsuk, MSc., of KacsukPatent, has published The Mathematics of Patent Claim Analysis, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

In patent law most of the crucial legal questions such as patentability and infringement are linked to the patent claims. The European Patent Office regards patent claims as a set of independent features which are examined separately in a more or less formal way. The author has found that this approach allows for developing a simple mathematical model which treats patent claim features as logical statements and patent claims as compound statements wherein the individual statements are connected by logical connectives. The proposed mathematical model provides a uniform system for examining various legal questions that are dealt with separately under current case law, moreover, it allows for developing an expert system for resolving complex legal situations and for automating the evaluation of a large number of patent claim variants that is currently not possible.

Legal Information / Communication Issues in the FCC Media Report, “Information Needs of Communities”

A number of legal information and legal communication issues are discussed in the U.S. Federal Communication Commission‘s (FCC’s) recent report on the state of U.S. media, entitled Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age (2011).

The report’s findings cover the following legal information / communication issues:

• In recent years, while media coverage of federal legal matters has improved, media coverage of state and local legal issues — including coverage of state and local legislatures, courts, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement — has declined, except for coverage of crime stories by local television news programs. The reason is that newspapers have recently reduced the numbers of professional journalists covering these institutions, and no other media have compensated. The report finds that for-profit news organizations are unlikely to fill this gap in coverage because returns on investment are too low.
• For example, “there are far fewer [state or local news organizations] covering Congressional delegations — especially their work on local issues. Twenty-seven states have no Washington reporters…[;] [t]he number of papers with bureaus in [Washington, DC] has dropped by about half since the mid-1980s; the number of reporters working for regional papers dropped from 200 in the mid-1990s to 73 at the end of 2008″; the number of statehouse reporters [nationwide] has dropped by one-third — from 524 in 2003 to 355 in 2009″; “newspapers send so few reporters [to courts] to do so much that [judicial] reporting has become more reactive and shallow, and less enterprising”; “[i]n Michigan, coverage of juvenile courts has” diminished substantially.
• Although public access to some U.S. legal information has increased substantially in recent years, according to the report, access to certain kinds of state and local legal information in some instances appears to have declined. The report describes instances in which access to local court records has declined, due to delays in posting digital court records online. The report finds that courts today more frequently reject freedom-of-information requests, and that newspapers and news associations today have fewer resources to challenge these denials of access in court.
• Although there are “39 local or regional cable news shows,” “only about 25–30 percent of the population can watch” them.
• State public affairs networks (SPANs) — the state-level equivalents of C-SPAN, which provide extended coverage of state legislative, judicial, and administrative proceedings — are available only in “23 states and the District of Columbia,” and these networks receive financial support from the cable industry “in only 4 states.” Only one of these networks is distributed on satellite TV. Although the new Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act of 2010 gives satellite TV providers an incentive “to provide retransmission of the SPANs,” experts “do not expect this flexibility to increase [satellite] carriage of SPANs.” “There is typically no statewide entity with whom a [SPAN] can contract for statewide carriage.” Only four SPANs, those “in Alaska, Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina[,] … are affiliated with a public broadcaster and none …directly receives [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] funding.”
• The report notes that one response to the decline of newspaper coverage of state government has been the creation in several states of “small news services [such as the Arizona Guardian] … reaching a small, intensely interested audience and charging high subscription prices.” The report observes that in other states, such as Ohio, “newspapers around the state joined together to help finance statehouse coverage.”
• The report notes that legal information makes up an important component of the coverage of “[n]ewspapers targeted specifically to Hispanic consumers.”
• Public television in Atlanta has created an e-participation platform as part of its “Lens on Atlanta” initiative.
• “Several PBS stations” use their “digital multicast channels” to broadcast legislative sessions, court proceedings, or public meetings.
• Although some public, educational, and government (PEG) channels on cable television cover local government, the number of, and funding for, these channels has recently declined substantially.
• On a low-power FM (LPFM) radio station in Spokane, Washington, law students and lawyers host a regular radio program — called Radio Law — about state and local legal issues.
• Respecting new media, the following findings concerning legal information and communication were made:
• Legislative information is made more accessible via the Sunlight Foundation‘s Congress app, Congrelate platform, and Fifty States Project (now called the Open States Project);
• Apps and platforms such as Filibusted, Legistalker, RealTimeCongress, and GovPulse improve citizens’ access to federal legislative and regulatory information and may foster public participation in lawmaking, while in Washington, DC, the DCCrimeFinder app identifies geographic locations where crimes have occurred;
• In Seattle and Washington, DC, crime statistics are among the most popular data sets made available online;
• Among the types of government data sets about which U.S. online journalists have recently expressed greatest interest are “Environmental datasets, which included data tracking violations and enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts,” and “Crime data”;
• Legal data made available online by U.S. states include “[e]nvironmental citations/violations” and “[d]isciplinary actions against attorneys”;
• The John Locke Foundation established the online news site Carolina Journal to cover North Carolina legislative matters.
• The report praises PACER, the U.S. federal courts’ information system, for making available online transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings and “digital audio recordings of court proceedings”; but the report notes that “[t]ranscripts from the U.S. Courts of Appeals are not made available” on PACER.
• Respecting state court information, the report finds “uneven” public access: “Supreme Court and appellate court … briefs are less often accessible [than briefs filed in federal cases]. At the trial court level … full access to filed court documents is rare.” The report notes that “[t]ranscripts can often be obtained directly from [state courts], and many courts offer electronically viewable and searchable transcripts, though often there is a fee for transcription services.” The report further observes that seven states “charge for online access to court records.”
• The report characterizes access to state and local police records as “problematic”: “The laws governing public access to law enforcement records differ significantly from state to state. No studies have been found that compile these differences.” The report praises Illinois for recently modifying its freedom-of-information statute to increase access to police records, including by “enhancing the powers of public access counselors.”
• The report finds that current U.S. federal tax law does not adequately accommodate nonprofit news organizations. In particular, the report finds that many nonprofit news organizations may be ineligible for tax-exempt status because their distribution methods resemble those of for-profit news organizations; nonprofit news organizations that obtain tax-exempt status are often taxed on their advertising revenue; and such organizations risk losing their tax-exempt status if they publish commentary about proposed legislation.

The report makes the following recommendations respecting legal information and communication:

• Government should encourage the growth and sustainability of nonprofit news organizations devoted to coverage of state and local public affairs;
• “[A] state public affairs network [SPAN] similar to C-SPAN” should be established in “every state”;
• Coverage of SPANs on public television — particularly on “multicast channels” — and cable television should be encouraged by the Corporate for Public Broadcasting’s offering incentives to public TV stations to carry SPANs, or by Congress’s “reducing the leased access requirements to cable operators that give carriage or financing to SPANs”;
• State governments should allow SPANs “to be part of the PEG [cable TV public, educational, and government channel] system,” a change that might make SPANs “eligible for fees from local [cable TV] franchising authorities”;
• Congress should encourage local cable news coverage “by reduc[ing] the leased access burdens for [cable companies] that carry local cable news efforts”;
• “Governments at all levels” should “collect and publish data” — especially data “related to: … legal compliance by regulated entities (e.g., fictitious business name registrations, environmental citations, disciplinary actions against attorneys and physicians)” — in “standardized, machine-readable, structured formats” “that make it easy for citizens, entrepreneurs, software developers, and reporters to access and analyze information.” “Data releases should include an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows the data to be shared easily with other computers and applications.” “[D]ata should be archived so that information, once posted, does not disappear over time”;
• “Government[s]” should “make proceedings and hearings available online, and … keep them in a publicly accessible archive”;
• State legislatures should improve access to public records by creating “Transparency Officer” and “Information Ombudsperson” positions; by ensuring that public records personnel have adequate training and understanding of applicable freedom-of-information laws; by changing public records laws to include “a presumption in favor of releasing documents whose disclosure would not undermine national security, public safety, compelling privacy interests, trade secrets, or law enforcement”; and by requiring state agencies to “post responses to information requests online to avoid duplication in requests and redundant compliance efforts”;
• Each government should “consider” creating a “single online portal to facilitate access to public documents” in multiple formats. “The portal could give access to webcasts …of all public meetings and hearings….” and “be used to post all nonemergency legislation for at least 72 hours prior to a final vote”;
• Federal tax law should be changed to permit nonprofit news organizations to publish commentary on proposed legislation without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status;
• A commission of experts on nonprofit journalism and experts on the law of taxation of nonprofit organizations should be convened to make recommendations about changes to federal tax law necessary to accommodate nonprofit news organizations that can cover state and local public affairs.

Wyner on Organizing Legal Textual Corpora

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has begun a discussion on the IAAIL LinkedIn group (an open group) of how to organize and aggregate legal textual corpora, and to enable commenting on them, for purposes of legal informatics research.

Talley and O’Cane on A Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements

Professor Eric L. Talley and Drew O’Cane, both of University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and the Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy, have posted The Measure of a MAC: A Quasi-Experimental Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

We develop a protocol for using a well known lawyer-coded data set on Material Adverse Change/Effect clauses in acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on both regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches, is designed to replicate, correct, and extend the reach of the hand-coded data. Our preliminary results indicate that both approaches perform well, though a hybridized approach improves predictive power even more. We employ Monte Carlo simulations show that our results generally carry over to out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that similar approaches could be used much more broadly in empirical legal scholarship, most specifically in the study of transactional documents in business law.

McMillan: Eight Rules of E-Filing

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has begun a new series of posts on court e-filing systems, entitled Eight Rules of E-Filing, at Court Technology Bulletin.

Mr. McMillan explains that in many U.S. court systems, “physical case files” continue to play a prominent role; and where document filing has been automated, it is often not integrated with other court information systems, such as those for “registry/docket (historical event record), participants, and scheduling /task control.”

In this series of posts, Mr. McMillan explains the benefits of integrating “[e]-filing, document, and case management functionality,” and offers best practices for e-filing systems.

July 7: NCCUSL to Consider Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act — formerly called The Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act — will be considered by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) at their upcoming annual meeting, on 7 July 2011, in Vail, Colorado. The Act would establish uniform legal standards for the authentication and preservation of U.S. state legal information in digital formats.

The chair of the drafting committee for the Act is Michele L. Timmons, the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Minnesota, and the committee’s reporter is Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law.

Click here for the meeting agenda.

Click here for the current draft of the Act and the memo describing it.

Click here for earlier drafts of the Act and related documents.

Legal Informatics / Legal Communication Papers @ ICA 2011

The following legal informatics or legal communication papers were presented at ICA 2011: The Conference of the International Communication Association, held 26-30 May 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (Click here for the full conference program. If you know of other legal communication or legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments):

• Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa, U of Tampere; Tuula-Riitta Valikoski, U of Tampere: Professional Communication and Listening Concepts of Finnish and American Legal Professionals
• Stacy Blasiola, U of Wisconsin: Say, “Cheese!” Bloggers and Cameras in Wisconsin’s Courtrooms
• Clarissa C. David, U of the Philippines; Jenna Mae Atun, Ateneo de Manila U: Framing in Legislation: The Case of Population Policy in the Philippines
• Stephanie Dixon, U of Southern California: Discursive Intervention in International Intellectual Property Policymaking: How Developing Countries and Civil Society Employ Text to Challenge and Change the Status Quo
• Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Yale U: Towards a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Policymaking
• Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Yale U: Translation in the Media Ownership Debate: The Work of Civil Society Groups and the Federal Communications Commission, 2002-2007
• John Gastil, U of Washington; Katherine Rhodes Knobloch, U of Washington: Evaluating Deliberative Public Events and Projects
• R. G. Lentz, McGill U.: The Discursive Alchemy of Telecommunications Regulation
• Dana Mastro, U of Arizona; Erin Blecha, Washington U – St. Louis; Anita Atwell Seate, U of Arizona: Characterizations of Criminal Athletes: A Systematic Examination of Sports News Depictions of Race and Crime
• Shinil Moon, SUNY – Buffalo; Kitae Kim, SUNY – Buffalo; Thomas H. Feeley, U of Buffalo: Predicting College Students’ Intentions to Illegally Download Music: The Role of Norms
• Anat Peleg, Bar Ilan U; Bryna Bogoch, Bar Ilan U: Removing Justicia’s Blindfold: The Mediatization of Law in Israel
• SunWolf, Santa Clara U.: A Narrative Approach to Jury Deliberations in the Legal Judicial System
• Karen Tracy, U of Colorado: How “Reasonable Hostility” Fares as a Norm of Communicative Conduct in Legislative Hearings About Same-Sex Unions
• Xiao Wang, Rochester Institute of Technology; Steven McClung, Mercer U: Toward a Detailed Understanding of Illegal Digital Downloading Intentions: An Extended Theory of Planned Behavior Approach
• Richard W.S. Wu, U of Hong Kong; Grace L. K. Leung, Chinese U – Hong Kong: Lawyers’ Image and Ethics in Hong Kong Television and Films: From Social Elite to Ordinary Professionals?

Those who have registered for the conference may access abstracts and full text of the papers on the conference Website. Others who wish to view abstracts or full text of these papers should contact the authors.

Legal Informatics Papers @ ECEG 2011

The following legal informatics papers were presented at ECEG 2011: The 11th European Conference on eGovernment, held 16-17 June 2011, at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Administration, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. (If you know of other legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to identify them in the comments; click here for the abstracts of most of the conference papers):

Mila Gascó and Carlos E Jiménez, Interoperability in the Justice Field: Variables That Affect Implementation. Abstract:

Several public institutions and agencies around the world have designed and implemented important electronic government strategies and plans. This has not been the case in the justice field. However, in the last very few years, the growing demand for efficient judicial systems has sped up the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) aimed at improving access to justice, increasing cooperation between legal authorities and strengthening the justice system itself. As in other areas, the new technologies are becoming a key tool in order to achieve these goals. That is so because information systems contribute to homogenize tasks and activities, to obtain management indicators and to make telematic connections with other public administrations and registers, with professionals and judicial institutions and with citizens. One of the more important aspects of this technological modernization has to do with interoperability since it guarantees the harmonic and cohesive functioning of different existing systems, processes, and applications that, in the justice field, are many as a result of the big variety of actors that are involved: judicial institutions but, also, different public administrations, such as those responsible of police forces, and law professionals. Taken this context into account, this paper is the result of an empirical research that was conducted during 2010 in the Generalitat de Catalunya (Autonomous Government of Catalonia) with regard to the e-government project “e-Justícia.cat”, an electronic justice initiative. In particular, the research was aimed at finding what factors conditioned the implementation of the interoperability modules of the project. In this respect, the paper presents the experience of GRP (management of police requests) and analyzes those variables that have been key in the implementation process in order to identify common patterns that may guide future interventions and projects in a field that is characterized by specific attributes that hinder technology adoption.

Hille Hinsberg, e-Participation Building Blocks in Estonia. Summary:

• Discusses “ID cards [...] enabling both electronic authentication and digital signing; [...] government online registers…; Estonia’s internet voting infrastructure,” and www.osale.ee, “[t]he Estonian Government’s central participation portal”:

www.osale.ee (‘osale’ means ‘participate’ in Estonian) was launched in 2007, allowing interest groups and individuals to comment on draft policy documents, launch their own ideas and initiatives for new legislation and amendments, and submit petitions. Other users can vote and comment on these proposals. Then the proposal is forwarded to the relevant government department, which in turn posts an answer, explaining what action was or was not taken and why. Currently, e-participation is about to be embedded in the policy-making framework to fulfill its potential for empowering citizens. Osale.ee consultations have been integrated with government’s policy preparation portal, where the full cycle of legal acts and policies becomes accessible for wider audience. Assisted by the new tool EIS, all interested groups and individuals can follow the policy-making process and provide comments throughout the stages, until the act is presented to the government session.

Bernhard Horn, Gerald Fischer, Roman Trabitsch and Thomas Grechenig, An Outline of the Technical Requirements on Governmental Electronic Record Systems Derived from the European Legal Environment. Abstract:

In modern e-government administrations, regulatory documents are not only drafted using computer tools but are increasingly managed using Electronic Record Systems (ERS). Such tools mean that coordination and administrative procedures do not only have to occur via e-mail or similar technologies. To execute the next administrational step using traditional methods, each officer has to know the inner organisational workflow and therefore those clerks responsible for performing the next administrational step to be able to forward the record to the correct person. Though till now this way of working has been quite common in many official organisations, there are a considerable number of software products available, which implement ERS, to assist performing administrative procedures electronically. When an officer has finished his respective process step, such a system automatically forwards the documents to the next responsible person. Moreover if several clerks have to perform a step in parallel, it is not necessary to copy the whole file several times but only to grant appropriate access permissions to the documents. Thus at any moment, everyone has the record in its latest version. Furthermore the whole administrative act can be tracked and monitored. It is important to remember however that within the European Union a couple of regulatory rules have to be obeyed when implementing and using such ERS. The providers of such systems as well as the authority using them are responsible for ensuring legal conformity. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the applicable European regulations concerning ERS for responsible stakeholders, such as IT-system designers and providers, administration chiefs, or researchers in the field of e-government.

Marijn Plomp and Jan Grijpink, Combating Identity Fraud in the Public Domain: Information Strategies for Healthcare and Criminal Justice. Abstract:

[...] We introduce the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation that explains large-scale chain co-operation as an answer to a dominant chain problem. Identity fraud proves to be the dominant chain problem in many chain co-operation situations. Therefore, our main research question is: what is a successful information strategy to combat identity fraud in the large-scale processes that constitute the public domain? Next, we demonstrate the problem of identity fraud using the example of the Dutch criminal justice chain, showing that a certain chain communication system enables to stop identity fraud using forensic biometrics. The second example is about healthcare. In the Netherlands, the government is introducing a national system of medical information exchange based on the national personal number as the sole identifier for recognition and linking. We show that people sometimes have interest in using somebody else’s number, to be treated in cases (s)he is not insured. [...] The examples are taken from our chain analysis programme that has an exploratory, empirical character. A chain analysis tests empirical findings against the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation, to derive a suitable chain-specific information strategy. We use this novel approach which is specifically tailored to the peculiarities of large-scale situations, as opposed to the small-scale approach usually employed in these cases. The traditional authentication procedures do not take into account ‘wrong person’ identity fraud that causes fraud surreptitiously spreading from chain to chain. Therefore, in both cases, the problem of identity fraud presents a threat to the chain co-operation that has to be tackled with a large-scale approach and with person-oriented security procedures and instruments that are indeed able to prevent identity fraud from happening undetected. It is precisely this approach and this type of procedures and instruments that are explained here. [...] Finally, we argue that an information strategy using basic, but chain-specific information systems, combined with random identity verification procedures enable combating identity fraud.

Open, Generative, and User Centered: The Potential of SMS-Based Legal Technology for Development

My new article, entitled Open, Generative, and User Centered: The Potential of SMS-Based Legal Technology for Development, has been published in Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 6(1), 63-68 (2011), doi: 10.1162/INOV_a_00058. (Click here for an open access version of the article.) Here is a summary:

For those desiring to create user-centered means of improving access to justice for low-income citizens of developing countries, SMS-based systems seem extremely promising. Development of such systems seems consistent with several trends in legal technology, including the unbundling of legal services, the empowering of legal clients, the prioritizing of citizens’ legal information needs and access capabilities in the design process, and the use of open source software. Further, legal-practice systems rooted in text-message technology could be extended to encompass a range of innovative law-related services and functions, including interactive document creation, e-filing of court documents, information retrieval, survey data collection, and online conferral with non-lawyers who possess relevant legal knowledge. By “meet[ing clients] where they are” and cultivating open systems, developers of open-source, SMS-based legal technologies such as mLegal exhibit great potential to enhance access to justice for low-income individuals in developing nations.

The article is a response to: Sean McDonald, Esq., The Case for mLegal, Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 6(1), 41-62 (2011), doi: 10.1162/INOV_a_00057 (Click here for open access version). Many thanks to Sean for the opportunity to contribute this article.

McDonald on mLegal: Mobile Legal Technology for Developing Nations

Sean Martin McDonald, Esq., of Frontline SMS and Frontline SMS: Legal, has published The Case for mLegal, Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 6(1), 41-62 (2011), doi: 10.1162/INOV_a_00057. (Click here for an open access version of the article.) Here is a summary:

While there are a number of obstacles [facing citizens of developing countries] to accessing legal systems, many of them are the result of barriers to communication. SMS is the world’s cheapest, most ubiquitous data communications platform, in large part, because it overcomes many of these barriers. Through simple pieces of open-source software, legal service providers could use SMS interfaces to keep digital records, conduct basic remote intake, and improve client management, reducing costs at a time when every cent counts. This article is an exploration of the potential role of mobile technologies in the extension and improvement of the rule of law.

Click here for Sean’s post about the article, on the Frontline SMS: Legal blog.