Three Efforts to Crowdsource Amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in Honor of Aaron Swartz: Lofgren-Wyden, EFF, and ForktheLaw

At least three separate efforts to crowdsource amendments to the U.S. federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) appear to have recently been launched:

• Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden have been using Reddit as a platform to crowdsource revisions to the statute; they call their amendments Aaron’s Law;
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute on its Website (e.g., here and here);
• Nadim Kobeissi is crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at a new site called Fork the Law.

[UPDATE: Daniel Schuman kindly just told me of a fourth effort: Professor Orin Kerr has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at Volokh Conspiracy. In addition, Meredith L. Patterson just told me that Fork the Law is run by a group, of which she and Nadim Kobeissi are members; the Fork the Law personnel are listed here.]

At least the first three of these efforts are being undertaken expressly in honor of Aaron Swartz, who, before his death, was prosecuted for alleged violations of the CFAA, among other statutes.

What’s notable to me about these efforts is their variety:

• variety of leaders (official legislators, public interest lawyers, a programmer, a law professor)
• variety of ideological perspectives (from moderate Democratic to libertarian)
• variety of intended audiences (including a broad general Internet audience, civil libertarians, programmers, the legal community)
• variety of platforms (a general social news site, a collaborative legal blog, the Website of a public interest law firm, a purpose-built site)
• and a variety of tools with which public attitudes and comments are posted, aggregated, processed, and then re-published for further public input.

The potential value of distributed and parallel crowdsourced drafting efforts is also apparent. Holding these different drafting efforts, targeted at different audiences with different types of knowledge and experience, in public on the open Web allows each of these drafting communities to learn from the others and adjust its draft accordingly, while maintaining its distinctive perspective. In particular, each drafting community can benefit from both legal and policy expertise expressed in other communities. So certain of the potential information advantages of working on the open Web — notably increased quantity, quality, and diversity of input — seem very likely to be realized through these CFAA crowdsourcing efforts.

HT Alex Howard, Eric Mill, and Stephen Schultze

New crowdsourced legislative proposal project on Reddit: Lofgren: Domain Name Seizures

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Zoe Lofgren is crowdsourcing the content of a U.S. federal legislative proposal, on the social media site Reddit.

Click here for the Reddit thread.

Representative Lofgren writes:

The goal of the legislation would be to build due process requirements into domain name seizures for copyright infringement. [...] The goal is to develop targeted legislation that requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for website operators to defend themselves prior to seizing or redirecting their domain names. The focus would be on government domain name seizures based on accusations that a website facilitates copyright infringement and not, for example, accusations of obscenity or libel. Feedback and input should also take into account any legitimate concerns that notice or delay might reasonably lead to destruction of evidence, threats to the physical safety of an individual, or other unintended negative consequences.

HT @juliepsamuels

On Participedia: Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitutional Drafting Process

Alexander Kok and others have posted Icelandic Constitutional Council 2011, on Participedia, the open global knowledge community for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement.

This page describes the processes by which Iceland has drafted a new national constitution, and the institutions involved in those processes. The page includes a helpful diagram of the drafting process.

Those processes are notable in part because they involved crowdsourcing the drafting of parts of the constitution by means of online social media.

The page also includes links to several sources that describe or analyze these drafting processes.

For more information, please see the complete page.

Disclosure: I contribute to Participedia.

Wyner and Peters Invite Participation in Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation Project

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have posted Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation, at Dr. Wyner’s blog, Language Logic Law Software.

Here is a summary of the post:

This is an academic research study on legal informatics (information processing of the law). The study uses an online, collaborative tool to crowdsource the annotation of legal cases. The task is similar to legal professionals’ annotation of cases. The result will be a public corpus of searchable, richly annotated legal cases that can be further processed, analysed, or queried for conceptual annotations.

Adam and Wim are computer scientists who are interested in language, law, and the Internet.

We are inviting people to participate in this collaborative task. This is a beta version of the exercise, and we welcome comments on how to improve it. Please read through this blog post, look at the video, and get in contact.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP): First Raw Feed Available

The first raw feed of the Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP), a collection of newly released U.S. court decisions, is now available at Public.Resource.Org, according to a tweet by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

Carl writes:

Will release processed version of cases in few weeks. Be careful if you use raw

Carl has also posted a new set of U.S. federal court decisions and docket information obtained from PACER, the U.S. federal judiciary’s fee-based database. Carl says a bit more about this data set in this tweet.

Click here for more information about RECOP.

New Source of Free U.S. Court Decisions: Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP)

In 2011, Public.Resource.Org will publish a weekly release — called the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) — of all slip and final opinions — in HTML — “of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 [U.S.] states and the [U.S.] federal government,” according to a new post by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

According to the post, the opinions will be licensed “under the Creative Commons CC-Zero License and will include full star pagination.”

According to the post, this effort is a joint project between Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase.

Participants in the Law.gov legal open government data movement will contribute to this project by “perform[ing] initial post-processing of the raw HTML data, including such tasks as privacy audits, conversion to XHTML, and tagging for style, content, and metadata.”

For more information, please see Carl’s post.

New Shecter Project: Open Legal Research

Robb Shecter, creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has announced a new, innovative Q&A site: Open Legal Research.

Murray & Miller, Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate

Hannah B. Murray, a J.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Law School, & Jason C. Miller, Esq., Law clerk to Circuit Judge Deborah L. Cook, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, have posted Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“Practitioners and courts are relying more and more on Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Hundreds of court opinions, including at least one from every federal circuit court, and thousands of law review articles cite Wikipedia. Some opinions have relied on Wikipedia for technical information, although others only turned to the consensus website for background information on minor points.

“This practice has generated controversy, with newspapers, professors, practitioners, and judges weighing in. Wikipedia in Court examines the controversy and the history of Wikipedia in court opinions before proposing a framework to determine when it is appropriate and inappropriate to rely on Wikipedia for authority in legal writing. Given the inconsistency in the legal community’s use of Wikipedia, courts and practitioners will benefit from this framework.”

Schultze on Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency

[NOTE: Updated on 29 September 2009 to link to the video of Stephen Schultze's presentation.]

Stephen Schultze, of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will present Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency (video available here, HT Connie Crosby) on September 8, 2009, at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, to be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC. Here is the abstract:

“Until now, the conversation about government 2.0 has focused almost exclusively on just two of the three branches of government: the executive and legislative. Our project, called RECAP, takes this movement to the third branch—the judiciary. Today, government puts federal court records online in a system called PACER: Public Access to Electronic Court Records. Created by the courts in the late 1980s, the system was ahead of the curve when it first appeared. But today, PACER is a relic of an earlier era. It keeps documents behind a pay-wall, offering users metered access at eight cents per ‘page’ (effectively, per screenful). This pay-to-play model severely hinders widespread access to the law by activists, academics, the media and other concerned citizens with an interest in the judicial process. Fortunately, these public documents are not eligible for copyright, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared and reproduced. RECAP enables citizens to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project, over time, is to publish an extensive archive to the public for free (as in beer). This will not only help people who are interested in a particular case, but will also pave the way for others to build more and better tools.

“In our talk, we plan discuss both the technical workings of RECAP, as well as the policy implications of our project. In particular, we will report on the current status of our collection, legal issues we have encountered and the larger policy context for our work.”

HT Tim O’Reilly.