Call for Papers: Computational Law Workshop: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 20 April 2011 — has been issued for Computational Law Workshop: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, to be held 6 June 2011, at The University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers for the workshop are invited on the following topics:

• Contract and Regulations as a basis for coordination of cross-organisational interactions
• System theoretic point of view Formalisms for expressing contracts and Regulations
• Contract description languages for Contract negotiation and validation
• Standards for capturing rules in contracts and regulations (e.g. RIF, Legal RuleML, LKIF, SBVR, etc):
• Run-time contract monitoring and enforcement Standardisation
• Systems Contract management requirements for specific contracts,
• Standards/initiatives (e.g. Web Services, BPEL4WS, WS-CDL, tc)
• Links between contracts, regulations, business processes and business services
• Practical experience with contract and regulations management systems Role

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

New on VoxPopuLII: Čyras on Legal Frameworks of Virtual Worlds

Professor Dr. Vytautas Čyras of the Vilnius University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has posted On a Legal Framework in a Virtual World: Lessons from the VirtualLife Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Čyras describes the regulatory infrastructure of VirtualLife, the experimental European Union-funded virtual world. In this infrastructure, legal and technological constraints are used together in an attempt to provide effective but flexible regulation.

Professor Čyras emphasizes the decentralized, “federalist” governance structure of VirtualLife — which provides for uniform protection of core rights while permitting groups to form smaller communities and to customize the laws that govern them — the peer-to-peer architecture of VirtualLife, which complements the decentralized governance structure; the VirtualLife e-contracting environment, which offers a variety of standard contract terms while allowing parties to create their own customized terms; and “virtual laws,” which enable technological grants and enforcement of intellectual property and other rights.

This post should be of interest to all those who are interested in the legal dimension of virtual worlds, including developers, policy makers, legal professionals, information systems researchers, and information providers.

DEON 2010 Proceedings Available

Proceedings are available for DEON 2010: The 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, held 7-9 July 2010 in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

The proceedings were edited by Giovanni Sartor and Guido Governatori.

Abstracts of the law-related papers presented at the conference will be posted here shortly.

Click here for the conference Website.

Benlamri et al. on Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions

Professor Rachid Benlamri of the Lakehead University Department of Software Engineering, and colleagues, have published Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions, 8 International Journal of Mobile Communications 71 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper describes a joint biometric-cryptographic authentication system for mobile e-government transactions. The system can be used to verify, prove, and enforce ‘mobile contracts’. The proposed system offers a cryptographical mutually-authenticated image exchange and face identification scheme, as well as remote signing of documents by transferring an authenticated image for personal face and signature operation. The system integrates two physically secured entities, a mobile device camera and a smart-card, both certified by some authority to enable undeniable visualised ‘mobile signature’. The result is a secured, traceable e-government infeasible-to-clone virtual person in a form that can be seen as a trustable ‘e-officer’.

Fraunhofer SIT Develops Digital Signature for Internet Telephony

Digital signature technology for Internet telephony — called VoIPS — has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, according to a press release issued by the institute 27 January 2010.

The technology could be used to authenticate agreements entered into via Internet telephone conversations.

The announcement gives the following illustration of a possible application of the technology:

A banker talks to a customer. This talk leads to a contract that is to be recorded in order to provide evidence. The banker presses the record button on his or her telephone, and the customer is automatically asked for consent. If the customer confirms, recording begins in accordance with the VoIPS principle, which is based on digital signature technology. The software from SIT divides the telephone calls into intervals and signs the transmitted data packets with corresponding metadata. To keep the separate packages from being stored in the wrong order, each interval is given a distinctive encoded ‘stamp’. In this way, VoIPS combines all the important information on a stored call into an indivisible chain. Any changes to the calls will be noticed, no matter when the change is made.

Representatives of the institute plan to demonstrate the technology at The GSMA Mobile World Conference, to be held 15-18 February 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT ACM Tech News.

Lampathaki et al. on Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability

Fenareti Lampathaki and colleagues at National Technical University of Athens, have published Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability, in Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: ADI, CAMS, EI2N, ISDE, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent, ODIS, ORM, OTM Academy, SWWS, SEMELS, Beyond SAWSDL, and COMBEK 2009, at 152 (2009). Here is the abstract:

“Pan-European policies envisioning a single European market and reduction of administrative burden call for effective, interoperable implementation and transformation of cross-border business-to-government services. Despite the existence of dedicated tools and methodologies that enable modelling and execution of cross-organizational business processes, a service-driven approach, that implies associating legal and business rules on the workflow, binding reusable documents with specific information exchanges among the stakeholders and extracting all-inclusive executable flows, remains to be adopted. In this context, the present paper outlines cross-dimensional patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European Business to Government Services interconnecting processes, data and rules under a common, cross-country prism. Such model-driven patterns foster interoperability on a conceptual and platform-independent basis. Discussion on the results is targeting best practices that can be drawn at research level and is pointing out the key difficulties that have to be tackled due to lack of enterprises’ and public organizations’ readiness in various countries.”

Call for Papers: DALT 2010: Declarative Agent Languages & Technologies Workshop

[NOTE: Updated on 1 February 2010 to note that submission deadlines have been extended to 9 February 2010.]

A call for papers, with submission deadline of 9 February 2010 2 February 2010, has been issued for DALT 2010: The 8th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, to be held 10 or 11 May 2010, in Toronto, Canada, in conjunction with AAMAS 2010: The 10th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Of the DALT 2010 topics respecting which papers are invited, the following seem particularly relevant to legal informatics researchers:

• Application of declarative techniques to declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies; and
• Application of declarative techniques to security and trust in multiagent systems.

For the complete list of topics, and for more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Wamberto Vasconcelos.

Research on Law and Virtual Worlds from the VirtualLife Project

A number of interesting recent papers on law in virtual worlds are available from the research page of VirtualLife, a virtual world project of the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), Objective 1.5 Networked Media (Netmedia). The project’s main academic partners are Vilniaus universitetas, Matematikos ir informatikos fakultetas, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Juristische Fakultät, Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Gerald Spindler. Here are the VirtualLife research works related to legal informatics/communication:

• G. Spindler, K. Anton, J. Wehage, Overview of the legal issues in virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009.
• Summary: The paper discusses virtual world property, user evaluation systems, data protection, intellectual property, advertising, the virtual world provider’s liability for user-generated content, and online dispute resolution in the VirtualLife system.
• Dan Bogdanov & Ilja Livenson, VirtualLife: Secure identity management in peer-to-peer systems. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009,
• Abstract: “The popularity of virtual worlds and their increasing economic impact has created a situation where the value of trusted identification has risen substantially. We propose an identity management solution that provides the user with secure credentials and allows to decrease the required trust that the user must have towards the server running the virtual world. Additionally, the identity management system allows the virtual world to incorporate reputation information. This allows the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to provide more input to users about the reliability of a certain identity. We describe how to use these identities to provide secure services in the virtual world. These include secure communications, digital signatures and secure bindings to external services.”
• Vytautas Čyras, Transforming legal rules into virtual world rules: a case study in the VirtualLife platform. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009; TrustVWs workshop “Virtual Worlds: Trust, Security, Rule of Law.”
• Abstract: “The paper addresses the implementation of legal rules in online virtual world software. The development is performed within a peer-to-peer virtual world platform in the frame of the FP7 VirtualLife project. The goal of the project is to create a serious, secure and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. The approach ‘From rules in law to rules in artifact’ is followed. The development accords with the conception ‘Code is law’ advocated by Lawrence Lessig. The approach implies the transformation of legal rules (that are formulated in a natural language) into machine-readable format. Such a transformation can be viewed as a kind of translation. Automating the translation requires human expert abilities. This is needed in both the interpretation of legal rules and legal knowledge representation.”
• D. Bogdanov, M.V. Crispino, V. Čyras, K. Lapin, M. Panebarco and F. Zuliani. Virtual world platform VirtualLife: P2P, security, rule of law and learning support. In: Proceedings of 2009 NEM Summit Towards Future Media Internet, 28-30 September 2009, Saint-Malo, pp. 124-129.
• Abstract: “This paper addresses the purposes, design decisions and innovative features produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform within the FP7 VirtualLife project. VirtualLife project aims to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment to be used for business, education and entertainment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world law compliant. Nevertheless, the research has also been focused on other technical aspects such as network, scripting and real-time 3D engine issues.”
• Čyras, V., Lapin K. User needs and legally ruled collaboration in virtual world platform VirtualLife. In Methods of Artificial Intelligence, Burczynski, T., Cholewa, W. and Moczulski, W. (eds.) AI-METH Series, Gliwice, Poland, November 2009, pp. 69-76. AI-METH 2009 Symposium on Methods of Artificial Intelligence. ISBN 83-60759-15-4.
• Abstract: “The paper addresses the purposes and design decisions produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform. The work is being done within the FP7 VirtualLife project. The purpose of the project is to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. The rule of law principle is extended to a virtual world. Such an extension advances the level of intelligence of an artifact. The approach accords with a trend in legal informatics ‘From norms in law to rules in artifact’. In the paper the authors reflect on user needs and learning support in a university virtual campus, a potential scenario. Virtual worlds’ opportunities in enhancing learning are discussed. A new paradigm of the content is characterized as interaction versus information.”
• V. Čyras & K. Lapin. Learning support and legally ruled collaboration in the VirtualLife virtual world platform. In: Proceedings of Associated Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the13th East-European Conference, ADBIS 2009, Riga, Latvia, September 7-10, 2009, Grundspenkis, J. et al. (eds.) LNCS, Springer (in print). INTEL-EDU workshop.
• Abstract: “The paper addresses the purposes and design decisions produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform. The work is being done within the FP7 VirtualLife project. The purpose of the project is to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. In the paper the authors reflect on user needs and learning support in a university virtual campus, a potential scenario. The opportunities of a virtual world in enhancing learning are discussed. A new paradigm of the content is characterized as interaction versus information.”
• Ilja Livenson, VirtualLife Security Infrastructure. Master’s thesis. University of Tartu, 2009.
• Summary: Describes VirtualLife’s security infrastructure, which incorporates “the X.509 PKI security infrastructure standard and provides identity management, support for multiple certicates, single sign-on, generic authorisation framework, signing of multi-party contracts and other functionality.”
• User Centric Future Media Internet ( September 2008), Networked Media Unit, DG Information Society and Media of the European Commission. Contribution by M. Panebarco.
• Summary: The law-related sections discuss such topics as identity management, trust, security, virtual law, digital signatures, ecommerce, and digital rights management.
• D1.1.1 – Project Progress Report (Jan-Jun ’08 ).
• Law-Related Progress Made: “Elaboration of the concept of law governed interaction of artificial agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) in order to comply with the Constitution has been carried out. Analysing different type of commercial contracts between the avatars, a key assumption that shall always hold in VirtualLife is that liability is defined only when an avatar can be associated with a human being behind it. Ultimately only the human is liable for the actions of the avatar. A theoretical concept for the legal framework for VirtualLife has been developed. Research on data protection requirements regarding the authentication and authorisation system and the inclusion of terms of service have been concluded. Research on the liability (e.g. contributory or vicarious liability) of service providers for their users’/customers’ acts and the requirements for monetary transactions is nearly finished.”
• D1.1.2 – Project Progress Report (Jul-Dec’08)
• Law-Related Progress Made: “During the third quarter of 2008 D7.1 was finalised. On the basis of the use case scenarios developed in WP2 (D2.1 and D2.2) UGOE conducted detailed research in different areas of law evaluating, in particular, international journal articles and case law with a focus on the protection of intellectual property interests in virtual worlds arising from copyright law, the law of registered trademarks and the law against unfair competition; the protection of minors in virtual worlds; advertising in virtual worlds; user evaluation systems in virtual worlds; contract formation including the requirements regarding electronic signatures and dispute resolution in virtual worlds. (International) law journals and online publications were monitored for new publications concerning legal issues in the context of virtual world, which also resulted in an extensive list of the current state of scholarly writings in this area.”
• Law-Related Plans for Immediate Future: “In January and February 2009, there shall be an analysis of how the rules of the Supreme Constitution and the Virtual Nation Constitution can be translated into actual technical restraints in order to minimize disputes from the outset. Suggestion for the next two years: The progress of VirtualLife’s architecture as well as the fact that the law in the context of virtual worlds is developing constantly, it is advisable that the project has permanent legal support by UGOE. …”
• D2.1: End User Definition and Needs (5th May 2009)
• Summary: “This paper intends to examine the state of the art with regard to virtual worlds in 2008 and to identify the fields of applications which seem to be more promising. The final goal is to identify to which user needs Virtual Life should respond. … We present in the present work some additional information related to the overall panorama of Virtual Worlds, in which we include for the purposes of the present analysis some examples of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, MMORPGs, in order to provide a short overview of their main features (an in-depth analysis of these platforms is implemented in D.11.3). Moreover, the present document intends to provide a documentation of the procedure that has been followed for identifying the main requirements which will drive the development of the VirtualLife platform. A description of a roadmap setting the path for the forthcoming analysis of user needs, focused on a specific scenario that the consortium has selected due exploitation potentials is also provided.” Covers a number of law-related issues.
• WP 7 Virtual Nation Juridical System: References of D7.1 Preliminary Report of the Legal Fundamentals Concerning Virtual Worlds
• Abstract: “The ‘VirtualLife’ project aims to provide an immersive and secure environment, combining a high quality 3D virtual experience with the trustiness of a secure communication infrastructure. VirtualLife constitutes a new form of civil organization, aimed at the creation of secure and ruled places within the virtual world, where important transactions can occur. The aggregation in communities and the collaboration between users is encouraged in order to reach a management of common and private interests. This collaboration is achieved through the definition of common rules that take care of all the involved cultures. A standard collection of laws, the Virtual Constitution, finalized to the creation and regulation of a secure and trusted environment (Virtual Nation) will be studied. In order to reach high quality 3D metaverses the world objects will be distributed on a peer-to-peer network with nodes connected using a secure protocol. Thus, the resulting Virtual World will not be hosted on a central server cluster but will be based on a network of Virtual Zone Servers (VZ Servers). The peer-to-peer architecture will enable easy and fast sharing of contents without third ruling partners: the only ruling entity will be the law in force, defined by the users community and accepted by those users who join the community afterwards. Each VZ Server simulates all the entities in the zone and gives the users the possibility to create and share contents, media and data in a very intuitive way.”

HT Vytautas Čyras.

Call for Papers: DEON 2010

[NOTE: Updated on 17 January 2010 to revise submission dates.]

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 20 27 February 2010 and paper submission deadline of 6 March 2010 — has been issued for DEON 2010: The 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 7-9 July 2010 in Florence, Italy. The conference has a special focus on Deontic Logic and Legal Systems. Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Legal rights
• Completeness and indeterminacy in legal systems
• Kinds of legal norms
• Modelling norms and values
• Legal power and competences
• The dynamic of legal systems
• Compliance and enforcement of obligations
• Contracts and other constitutive acts
• The logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, the logic of action, and other related areas of logic
• The formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems
  the formal representation of legal knowledge
• The formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorisation, delegation, power, responsibility and liability
• The formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration
• Applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints
• Normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Candeub & Kuykendall on eMarriage & the E-Marriage Project

Professor Adam Candeub & Professor Mae Kuykendall, both of the Michigan State University College of Law, and administrators of the E-Marriage Project, have published E-Marriage: Breaking the Marriage Monopoly. Here is the abstract:

“This Article advocates updating the law governing marriage formation to recognize the shift in social interactions from real to virtual life. We argue that couples can use internet communications not only to marry when separated by great distance but also to choose which state’s laws will authorize their marriage. In particular, same sex couples could marry under the laws of a state that permit such unions, regardless of where they exchange vows.

“States inadvertently have created geographic monopolies, requiring each marriage receiving the benefits of their licensing laws to be performed within their borders. This Article’s model builds upon established precedents, such as proxy marriage and choice of law for multi-jurisdictional and internet contracts. Using the power of internet communications, our proposal allows states to compete over marriage’s procedures and substance. Depending on a couple’s preferences for ‘e-ritual’ and a state’s desired level of regulatory control, couples could consume the trappings of a traditional ceremony before their friends and family, without travelling to another jurisdiction, perhaps with an officiant presiding on-line from a remote location. More simply, couples could have a complete marriage ceremony in the location of their choice, but would receive a license and file necessary papers with a distant state jurisdiction.

“Some states do not recognize types of marriages that other states authorize, i.e., Massachusetts same sex marriage or Louisiana covenant marriage. Every type of e-marriage will not be enforceable everywhere. We argue, however, that marriage satisfies a unique human need for socially sanctioned commitment, which a simple contract cannot satisfy, a point ignored by those who argue for a purely private, contractual approach to marriage. E-marriage can more efficiently distribute the ‘status good’ of marriage-even if it cannot provide a legally enforceable relationship in every state. Finally, our proposal encourages a legal cosmopolitanism as individuals witness a variety of sanctioned relationships within their own places of worship and communities, defusing protracted political struggles at the state level over substantive marriage rules.”

The E-Marriage Project (or Legal E-Marriage Project) “is a clearinghouse for legislative proposals to institute ‘e-marriage.’” In addition to legislative proposals, the project’s Website links to blogposts and Webcasts/podcasts about the project.