We'd be interested to see how that'd look. Will contact you via email.
Re jQuery: this is an emphasis in our copy for this post to Hacker News only. We've found that it helps technical people (many of our customers are technical) understand what we're doing.
Yes, "compile target" is a very nice way to put it. The key idea is that you only really analyze all the text when there's a problem, which tends to be the job of experts, and that's not often. The wet code that "runs" in a court needs to be part of the doc, but it doesn't mean we need to look at it all the time. :)
Re guarantees, these docs are provided on an informational basis (read: not legal advice). We connect people with lawyers who understand the system and we have some good tech that speeds up their work re the legal sign off they provide. More to come on this.
One of the main ideas behind the system is using simplified language to "call" modules of legalese like software functions. This technique abstracts away a lot of complexity on the top layer of the contract (which makes the document much shorter and easier to understand).
Most of the jurisdictional quirks are contained in legalese, so when you abstract it away, you end up with documents that look the same regardless of jurisdiction (the legalese modules change, obviously).
We often compare this approach to jQuery because it lets us:
- get rid of boilerplate "code" for common mechanics to aid in clarity and brevity (thanks, jQuery); and
- use consistent language between jurisdictions (like jQuery's elimination of cross-browser incompatibilities).
There's more explanation of this technique in the second video on this page:
The primary problem with law is the technicality of the language, aka "legalese".
At the moment, expecting someone off the street to properly understand a legal document is broadly equivalent to expecting them to understand what's going on with a command line (assuming they use computers only casually).
Law needs the equivalent of a GUI.
It's possible. Some other lawyers and I are working on an open source system of "defined phrases" that can be used like software functions. Lawyers already define words, there's no reason you can't do the same with phrases.
Each plain english phrase represents a module of legalese that can be manipulated with "arguments" specified in conjunction with the phrase. Like a GUI, a comprehensible representation is there for the user, and the technical legalese still does all the work underneath.
I was considering this out the outset, but one of the benefits of sending responses this way is that other people I work with have started to use it (which they wouldn't if it appeared as a snippet).
I used to embed tags in emails, e.g., will-reply:2d and silly stuff like that for two reasons:
1) Keyboard macros could expand it into human-readable text (but leave the tag) and
2) The email client I used at the time made it easy to hang functionality off of email content so I could automate stuff like issue and time tracking etc. based on email tags.
Yep - that's how the commercial technical detail is often dealt with. We're stretching (and slightly rejigging) the same concept to legally substantive text.
Hi everyone, I'm a contributor to LawPatch. We started this project because we wanted legal positions that we could call like functions (as if we were coding).
Our aim is to make legal language simple without introducing ambiguity or extra risk.
We think even the most technical legal agreements could look like term sheets using this drafting method. A spectrum of standardised positions also stops lawyers from constantly replicating work.
This is is an open source project by lawyers who are also developers - we'd love to hear from anyone who's got ideas for improvements or would like to contribute language for other areas.
We have patches drafted for the United States, UK and Australia. Happy to hear from people in other countries too! Creating this extra level of abstraction is also an opportunity to standardize documents across jurisdictions.
Agree that foot / end noting is another good way to do it - the important thing is the drafting technique rather than the way it's implemented.
We're using Github permalinks to cover the linking issue for now, but we're discussing more permanent options. Would be interested to hear what other ways people think would work.
There's also the option for users to download the repos and use the commit hash in the document proper for reference.
The doctrines underpinning IP law are flimsy and arbitrary. It's normal for technology to change the balance of power (and the laws that enshrine that balance).
In the current environment, Hollywood's business model is unreasonable, and people know it. Until people think it's reasonable, a lot of them are going to pirate. Technology has changed. Hollywood needs to change.
What should be illegal, is threatening to sue someone for working on code with others.
It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is.
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Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi here (I'm a lawyer when I'm not a developer). If you give someone any kind of reason to sue you, you're essentially handing them a stick. It's much worse if they can afford to hit you with it and you can't afford to defend yourself. The people threatening to sue these guys are almost certainly making silence a condition not to sue. This isolates the devs from people who could support them, and has the added effect of intimidating other devs with the unexplained "disappearances".
There is no western legal system. As absurd as it sounds, what went down with TPB shows how laws perspire beyond a country's boundaries.
As for what actually happened to PT, it isn't as clear-cut as it seems.
I can tell you one thing as food for thought, though. I contributed a minor patch to two forks. I was granted a small amount of dogecoins (about $.10) for one of those contributions. The notion that there would be a remuneration model behind that rather unique type of open-source project tells a lot about how lacking we are. We miss economic models for the free capabilities we build. Things like Gittip only just emerge, but the way they solve the problem of having multiple people be granted a fair share of buying power based on their contributions don't actually rely on a robust mathematical model, and are very probably flawed at scale. That is true of Gittip, it is true of Flattr (notably irrelevant when dealing with a team), it is even true of the Bitcoin ecosystem, given the absence of a proof for the convergence of its volatility.
Those challenges raised by the amazing prospect of a truly decentralized economy are greater than building an app on top of a peer-to-peer network of video distribution. They wouldn't be the first to direct their efforts there, either; a famous TPB member created Flattr after putting his TPB past behind.
PS: on the issue of the struggle for equitable remuneration, here is an outstanding blog post by someone working in a cooperative called Igalia; he did contractor work on V8 and Firefox for Bloomberg: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money
I was thinking about approximately this just yesterday. I have a banal coding problem that's in the way of what I actually want to do, and would be prepared to pay somebody maybe a hundred bucks to make it go away. Probably there exists a person with the skills and experience to make that happen easily, and for whom that would constitute a non-insulting payment, but I don't know how to find them. There are open source bounty sites, but I doubt I'm going to find the specialist I need on any of them. So instead I'm going to have to spend hours or maybe days learning stuff I would rather not know about.
Edit: If anybody can make this python call to lilv's swig bindings not segfault, I will give them a hundred bucks:
I agree. But where are they going to host it? Maybe you don't get hit with a lawsuit, but your github repo still gets taken down. Set up a hidden service git repo? Does that scale? How do you accept changes? I'm sure people are making and sharing changes privately. Maybe there is a need for better censorship-resistant code collaboration tools? Some kind of peer-to-peer github that works over Tor.
Re jQuery: this is an emphasis in our copy for this post to Hacker News only. We've found that it helps technical people (many of our customers are technical) understand what we're doing.