Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation. We focus on “the facts of the case,” as described in a judge’s opinion, and then we describe the way the court applied the law to such facts as doctrine, hardly pausing to note the irony of this ex cathedra image, smacking of infallibility. Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

Developments in legal scholarship pose a challenge to our continued near-exclusive reliance on a court’s version of the “facts.” The last 20 years have seen a trend toward increased emphasis on “stories” as a feature of legal teaching and scholarship.

Positive law, inscribed in legal texts, entails an authority not inherent in literary texts, generating legal consequences that can have real effects on a person’s life and liberty. The interpretation of legal texts, necessarily a normative undertaking, resists the mechanical application of rules, though still requiring a measure of predictability, coherence with other relevant legal norms and compliance with constitutional safeguards. The present proliferation of legal texts on the internet (codes, statutes, judgments, treaties, doctrinal treatises) renders the selection of relevant texts and cases next to impossible. We may expect that systems to mine these texts to find arguments that support one’s case, as well as expert systems that support the decision-making process of courts, will end up doing much of the work.

This raises the question of the difference between human interpretation and computational pattern-recognition and the issue of whether this difference makes a difference for the meaning of law. Possibly, data mining will produce patterns that disclose habits of the minds of judges and legislators that would have otherwise gone unnoticed (reinforcing the argument of the ‘legal realists’ at the beginning of the 20th century). Also, after the data analysis it will still be up to the judge to decide how to interpret the results or up to the prosecution which patterns to engage in the construction of evidence (requiring a hermeneutics of computational patterns instead of texts). My focus in this paper regards the fact that the mining process necessarily disambiguates the legal texts in order to transform them into a machine-readable data set, while the algorithms used for the analysis embody a strategy that will co-determine the outcome of the patterns. There seems a major due process concern here to the extent that these patterns are invisible for the naked human eye and will not be contestable in a court of law, due to their hidden complexity and computational nature.

This position paper aims to explain what is at stake in the computational turn with regard to legal texts. This prepares for the question I want to put forward to those involved in distant reading and not-reading of texts: could a visualization of computational patterns constitute a new way of un-hiding the complexity involved, opening the results of computational ‘knowledge’ to citizens’ scrutiny?

A property right (ius in rem, real right) is an abstract legal concept which relates to an object, referred to as “thing” or “res,” or imprecisely, but commonly, “property.” This object of property is a product of legal categorisation; it may be represented by a physical thing or it can be an abstract legal creation itself, as is the case with an intellectual property right. In any event, for the law the “property-object” (whether tangible, intangible or purely intangible) is the product of a legal conceptualisation. The law (private law) creates any res or thing, whether corporeal or not, through the legal concept of real rights. That enables legal recognition of the res in question. The material object (if there is one) only becomes a res in law if real rights are attached to it. Therefore, real rights and res are both “property”, and particularly with (purely intangible) intellectual property, property rights and property objects merge into one. The abstract conceptual res typically has a reifier to make it recognisable in the material world and for the purpose of social interactions. This reifier can be a corporeal object, in which case it is a direct reifier (a table being a direct reifier and incident of a res, chattel), but, for example in case of copyright, a chattel may act not only as direct reifier of the notional personal (moveable) property right (e.g. a canvas of a painting, the score of a symphony, the paper of a manuscript), but also as an indirect reifier of the notional copyright (artistic work, musical work, literary work). The chattel in question represents directly the personal/moveable property (but does not constitute it, because the res remains a legal concept), and, in addition, the chattel represents indirectly the copyright in the work which is expressed and recorded in the chattel in question (a painting, sculpture etc.).

This Article initiates an account of things in the law, including both conceptual things and material things. Human relationships matter to the design of law. Yet things matter too. To an increasing extent, and particularly via the advent of digital technology, those relationships are not only considered ex post by the law but are designed into things, ex ante, by their producers. This development has a number of important dimensions. Some are familiar, such as the reification of conceptual things as material things, so that computer software is treated as a good. Others are new, such as the characterization of material things as conceptual things, so that digital goods become licensable. The regulatory consequences of the thing are increasingly built into the construction of the thing. These developments appear to be poised to envelop things beyond the digital sphere. It may no longer be apt to divide the world cleanly into conceptual and material objects. Things combine features of both. As a result, they can no longer be viewed solely as passive backgrounds against which relation-based legal analysis unfolds. To ensure that society maintains the ability to regulate as broadly as it deems legitimate, law must account for the creation and design of the things that increasingly dominate developments across a variety of legal domains, from intellectual property law to antitrust law to commercial law. The Article describes how things exercise the authority that characterizes classic legal regulation, and it reviews the different mechanisms that legal institutions have used to recognize and differentiate things. Understanding those mechanisms is a step toward appreciating the nature of the regulatory landscape in which both legal institutions and individuals exist.

Addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project.

Welcome to the Public Index, a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

While Lessig is incensed at the raising of a generation of criminals, he is unfazed at the thought of raising a generation of commodities, whose attention and interest is a source of revenue for some venture capitalist. At a time when advertising directly to children is under increasing scrutiny, and for good reason, the commodification of friendship and of home videos should make a parent of young children concerned. But it does not.

I hope that these recommendations will prove equally appealing to those who think that Google can do no evil and those who think it does only evil. Perhaps they will prove equally frustrating. The settlement is good as it stands, but it could stand to be better.

Unless and until some deal can be worked out for digital rights to images, the focus of the digital library is limited to text—just as we enter the golden age of visual narration.

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

In the trials, the attorneys disputed the applicable meaning of the term event.

Democracy won’t fall just because our privacy is invaded; it will fall if we don’t ensure due process for those on whom data is collected and accountability of those who collect and control the data.

To the extent it or other search engines limit access to parts of their index, their public-spirited defenses of their archiving and indexing projects are suspect.

The program is driven by requests for service from the public. Inspectors respond to complaints and enforce, interpret, and educate citizens about the noise ordinance.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.

Worked to develop an online entertainment cooperative, a nonprofit digital music distribution system modeled after proposals to reform the current entertainment industry and intellectual property system via collective licensing and revenue-pooling regimes

Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.

William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

Privacy is a complex and often abstract topic: this symposium will address "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, and bring together experts from a range of perspectives.

"Smart mobs" used to enforce marijuana prohibition. Proof that open/participatory architecture need not be linked to progressive/liberatory ends.

Documentary filmmakers have created, through their professional associations, a clear, easy to understand statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use.

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism."

Researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and at Lappeenranta University of Technology where he teaches Information and Technology law. He is also leader of the Finnish Creative Commons.

The call for this new regulation is being led by the United States government and the European Commission, pushed by highly paid lobbyists for a trade association that includes Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Real Networks and a handful of other companies.

The treaty would give broadcasters 50 years of copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one

There's a new restriction on content waiting in the wings--a "webcaster's right" that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up.

With China joining the WTO at the end of last year it has become more important for Westerners to understand this aspect of Chinese society...

This is a good book if you want a detailed history of how copyright law evolved to accomodate digital technology and the Internet...

This is an insightful though often quick and unfocused examination of the history of copyright law...