9 ms·

Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

107 points by jruohonen 3y ago

Arteiii 3y ago
thanks for this post, I always feel a bit overwhelmed when it comes to licensing and other legal aspects of software development
nkmnz 3y ago
What about the opposite? Computer Science for lawyers?
- jruohonen 3y ago
  Plenty of that; much more than the other way around, in fact, I assert. In any case, a highly recommended monograph easily grasped also by computer scientists and their students. The only major limitation is that the book is eurocentric, but that is probably unavoidable already due to length limitations. EDIT: Get the whole copy (not everything seems to be on the website) from here: https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_scientists.pdf https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_sc...
- syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  The typical lawyer knows more about computers and programming, than a typical programmer knows about the law. I think this is the case for most fields with respect to programming.
  - scrozart 3y ago
    What, exactly, are you basing this assumption on?
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    I am not so sure. Many of my day job colleagues struggle to use Excel, let alone code anything. By contrast there seem to be a lot of programmers who have a basic understanding of the law, at least as it applies to them.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    What type of law and what type of programming? Everyone has to be aware of computers these days, but that doesn't make them know anything about programming. Meanwhile, in between traffic laws, financial laws (taxes, particularly), employment law, invention patent laws, maybe real estate/permitting laws, a programmer and any person in society needs to have some knowledge of the law to exist more than a lawyer needs to know about programming.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      Generally, what the average programmer "knows" about the law is the equivalent to what the average lawyer "knows" about programming: the superficial, easy stuff that you can pick up without any actual training or effort.
      - trashtester 3y ago
        Virtually every grown-up will interact with the law multiple times per day, especially traffic laws. Half the population has not written a single computer program in their life.
        gamblor956 3y ago
        Virtually every grown-up will use a computer multiple times per day, even all day. That is the same level of interaction as your example.
        trashtester 3y ago
        I didn't argue about "using a computer", only about "programming". I agree that "using a computer" is an experience most people will have a similar exposure to as they have to legal matters. "Programming" is more analogous to writing litigation documents or contracts, where formal errors tend to have very bad consequences.
  - 1propionyl 3y ago
    I'm not sure about that. But I would say: The typical programmer thinks they know far more about the law, than a typical lawyer thinks they know about programming.
  - trashtester 3y ago
    That doesn't match my experience. But more importantly, there are areas of the law that require fairly comprehensive understanding of computer systems, both on the development, infrastructure and applications such as data science to properly understand. (Not understanding the tech makes it impossible to fully understand the law). For instance, if an average lawyer tasked with ensuring that a company is in compliance with GDPR, and come across terminology such as "Data Protection by Design & Default" with further references to "Pseudonymization" and "Anonymization", will they even know how to start a review of the present situation in an organization for these topics? My experience is that there is often a significant gap between where the understanding of the legal team ends and where the development and data science teams take responsibility that isn't covered by anyone. The main problem is that legal coverage of data protection topics (such as [1]) often do not prescribe very specific specifications for how to be compliant. Instead, it requires people to use good judgement. Someone with a background in law will be used to this, but will usually not understand the technology well enough to have developed the kind of intuition needed to do so. And when they sit down with a team of typical engineers, communication can get really difficult. The engineers tend to want very specific instructions on what to do, and many will not react well if confronted with the relatively loose (for an engineer) legal language. Some will just ignore the parts they don't understand, while others will go to the other extreme and propose draconian measures that will at best be extremely costly. The latter group tends to be ignored by management. In the end, many compliance initiatives end up with a lot of forms that serve as little more than window dressing, but where the hard bits that nobody really understand end up ignored. To really achieve compliance, an organization will need people who are (in the same person) able to read legal texts with a lawyer's ability to interpret combined with the ability think like a black hat hacker trying to penetrate, a paranoid operations person terrified of data loss or a shady data scientist that keeps taking all sorts of shortcuts. Few organizations have such lawyers available. [1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/accountability-and-governance/guide-to-accountability-and-governance/accountability-and-governance/data-protection-by-design-and-default/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
bomb-judges 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
genneth 3y ago
This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.
- t8sr 3y ago
  I'm not sure why you feel the need to double-quote that. At any rate, the book seems to cover UK law, and in fact is published at Oxford?
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    I'm not sure why you're attracting downvotes for correctly stating that the way law works in the UK is very different than the way it works in continental Europe. The UK is a common law country, like the US, while many EU nations use civil law systems. The basic mechanisms of UK law are more similar to US law than to French law. The actual laws on the books are probably the other way around, though.
- johndhi 3y ago
  It's really hard to compare them. Just like it's hard to compare one country to another. So many factors.
  - johndhi 3y ago
    The common way people think about common law versus civil law is this: -common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal decisions -civil law relies more on regulators. In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long. That's the common understanding. These days though both EU and US are converging a bit in their approach.
dblitt 3y ago
Does anyone know of any similar works that instead focus on a common law background (US/UK/others) vs civil law (EU/most of the world), that I am understanding this book focuses on? This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here. Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford?
- johndhi 3y ago
  What are some of your basic questions about the legal system? Happy to take a shot at answering.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  > Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford? Up until recently, the UK was part of the EU and researchers across the EU received grant funding from EU ERC for various research projects. Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what.
johndhi 3y ago
I'm a lawyer that works in tech. Anybody got questions for me? I fine these primers almost always focus too much on technicalities and don't make the takeaways sufficiently obvious.
- godelski 3y ago
  Why not write a blog then to fill in that gap?
  - johndhi 3y ago
    Been thinking about it, but our industry is a service industry and we prefer to get paid to offer our expertise. If I go out on my own and find myself lacking clients, I might.
    - godelski 3y ago
      I hear you, but at the same time, you're addressing a community where we do a lot of free work. The world wouldn't run without the open source unpaid software that we build. I can't critique you for this choice, as it is quite reasonable. But I can say that such publication can help others (potentially a reward in itself) and can help drive customers to you, who recognize that more nuance is necessary than what can ever be expressed in a blog aimed at non-experts.
      - bubba12321 3y ago
        This book may already exist: https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intelligence-Radically/dp/B0C7DT6627 https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...
      - johndhi 3y ago
        Fair enough. Thanks. But... When I offer to do this here no one takes me up on it! So maybe the world doesn't need my blog.
mo_42 3y ago
When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  When you include common-law and look at the broader cycle, I'd argue the legal system is more like a JIT optimization rather than source code: We formalize and streamline lots of existing implicit social rules and shared expectations, things that exist-before and can operate-without any formal legal text... Just not as well. In other words, the relationship is more like recipes versus cooking. People cooked foods first-- possibly many many times--and then formalized them later with documentation and rules to help make an outcome transferable or fast. However, it would be a mistake to think that just because recipes are ubiquitous, they are a prerequisite for the process.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    thou nobody ever got put in jail because he defied the recipe
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      King Henry III disagrees [0], but arguably that's both. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale
- agumonkey 3y ago
  Hehe, I felt this slightly a few times in the recent years. Economy is also a large scale self adjusting optimizer, logistical neural network ?
- Reflecticon 3y ago
  Lawyer here and even though I know just a little about programming, I also always think that laws, contracts etc are like code running on society. Only when people fight over it and go to court, you run it on a "computer" but we only can test it beforehand running on human imagination. I'm very excited about chatgpt and it's capabilities to finally have a test environment for clauses where we can ask of ambiguity of terms, cases we haven't considered in the law/agreement and contradictions within the document. If we could have an ide for lawyers, that would be great too.
bubba12321 3y ago
Try also, "The Legal Singularity" by two law professors from the University of Toronto https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intelligence-Radically/dp/B0C7DT6627 https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...
eimrine 3y ago
I like your illustrations.

107 points by jruohonen 3y ago

thanks for this post, I always feel a bit overwhelmed when it comes to licensing and other legal aspects of software development

nkmnz 3y ago

What about the opposite? Computer Science for lawyers?

jruohonen 3y ago
Plenty of that; much more than the other way around, in fact, I assert. In any case, a highly recommended monograph easily grasped also by computer scientists and their students. The only major limitation is that the book is eurocentric, but that is probably unavoidable already due to length limitations. EDIT: Get the whole copy (not everything seems to be on the website) from here: https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_scientists.pdf https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_sc...
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
The typical lawyer knows more about computers and programming, than a typical programmer knows about the law. I think this is the case for most fields with respect to programming.
- scrozart 3y ago
  What, exactly, are you basing this assumption on?
- torstenvl 3y ago
  I am not so sure. Many of my day job colleagues struggle to use Excel, let alone code anything. By contrast there seem to be a lot of programmers who have a basic understanding of the law, at least as it applies to them.
- fragmede 3y ago
  What type of law and what type of programming? Everyone has to be aware of computers these days, but that doesn't make them know anything about programming. Meanwhile, in between traffic laws, financial laws (taxes, particularly), employment law, invention patent laws, maybe real estate/permitting laws, a programmer and any person in society needs to have some knowledge of the law to exist more than a lawyer needs to know about programming.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    Generally, what the average programmer "knows" about the law is the equivalent to what the average lawyer "knows" about programming: the superficial, easy stuff that you can pick up without any actual training or effort.
    - trashtester 3y ago
      Virtually every grown-up will interact with the law multiple times per day, especially traffic laws. Half the population has not written a single computer program in their life.
      - gamblor956 3y ago
        Virtually every grown-up will use a computer multiple times per day, even all day. That is the same level of interaction as your example.
        trashtester 3y ago
        I didn't argue about "using a computer", only about "programming". I agree that "using a computer" is an experience most people will have a similar exposure to as they have to legal matters. "Programming" is more analogous to writing litigation documents or contracts, where formal errors tend to have very bad consequences.
- 1propionyl 3y ago
  I'm not sure about that. But I would say: The typical programmer thinks they know far more about the law, than a typical lawyer thinks they know about programming.
- trashtester 3y ago
  That doesn't match my experience. But more importantly, there are areas of the law that require fairly comprehensive understanding of computer systems, both on the development, infrastructure and applications such as data science to properly understand. (Not understanding the tech makes it impossible to fully understand the law). For instance, if an average lawyer tasked with ensuring that a company is in compliance with GDPR, and come across terminology such as "Data Protection by Design & Default" with further references to "Pseudonymization" and "Anonymization", will they even know how to start a review of the present situation in an organization for these topics? My experience is that there is often a significant gap between where the understanding of the legal team ends and where the development and data science teams take responsibility that isn't covered by anyone. The main problem is that legal coverage of data protection topics (such as [1]) often do not prescribe very specific specifications for how to be compliant. Instead, it requires people to use good judgement. Someone with a background in law will be used to this, but will usually not understand the technology well enough to have developed the kind of intuition needed to do so. And when they sit down with a team of typical engineers, communication can get really difficult. The engineers tend to want very specific instructions on what to do, and many will not react well if confronted with the relatively loose (for an engineer) legal language. Some will just ignore the parts they don't understand, while others will go to the other extreme and propose draconian measures that will at best be extremely costly. The latter group tends to be ignored by management. In the end, many compliance initiatives end up with a lot of forms that serve as little more than window dressing, but where the hard bits that nobody really understand end up ignored. To really achieve compliance, an organization will need people who are (in the same person) able to read legal texts with a lawyer's ability to interpret combined with the ability think like a black hat hacker trying to penetrate, a paranoid operations person terrified of data loss or a shady data scientist that keeps taking all sorts of shortcuts. Few organizations have such lawyers available. [1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/accountability-and-governance/guide-to-accountability-and-governance/accountability-and-governance/data-protection-by-design-and-default/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

bomb-judges 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

genneth 3y ago

This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.

t8sr 3y ago
I'm not sure why you feel the need to double-quote that. At any rate, the book seems to cover UK law, and in fact is published at Oxford?
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I'm not sure why you're attracting downvotes for correctly stating that the way law works in the UK is very different than the way it works in continental Europe. The UK is a common law country, like the US, while many EU nations use civil law systems. The basic mechanisms of UK law are more similar to US law than to French law. The actual laws on the books are probably the other way around, though.
johndhi 3y ago
It's really hard to compare them. Just like it's hard to compare one country to another. So many factors.
- johndhi 3y ago
  The common way people think about common law versus civil law is this: -common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal decisions -civil law relies more on regulators. In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long. That's the common understanding. These days though both EU and US are converging a bit in their approach.

dblitt 3y ago

Does anyone know of any similar works that instead focus on a common law background (US/UK/others) vs civil law (EU/most of the world), that I am understanding this book focuses on? This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here. Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford?

johndhi 3y ago
What are some of your basic questions about the legal system? Happy to take a shot at answering.
Cheer2171 3y ago
> Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford? Up until recently, the UK was part of the EU and researchers across the EU received grant funding from EU ERC for various research projects. Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what.

johndhi 3y ago

I'm a lawyer that works in tech. Anybody got questions for me? I fine these primers almost always focus too much on technicalities and don't make the takeaways sufficiently obvious.

godelski 3y ago
Why not write a blog then to fill in that gap?
- johndhi 3y ago
  Been thinking about it, but our industry is a service industry and we prefer to get paid to offer our expertise. If I go out on my own and find myself lacking clients, I might.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I hear you, but at the same time, you're addressing a community where we do a lot of free work. The world wouldn't run without the open source unpaid software that we build. I can't critique you for this choice, as it is quite reasonable. But I can say that such publication can help others (potentially a reward in itself) and can help drive customers to you, who recognize that more nuance is necessary than what can ever be expressed in a blog aimed at non-experts.
    - bubba12321 3y ago
      This book may already exist: https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intelligence-Radically/dp/B0C7DT6627 https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...
    - johndhi 3y ago
      Fair enough. Thanks. But... When I offer to do this here no one takes me up on it! So maybe the world doesn't need my blog.

mo_42 3y ago

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

Terr_ 3y ago
When you include common-law and look at the broader cycle, I'd argue the legal system is more like a JIT optimization rather than source code: We formalize and streamline lots of existing implicit social rules and shared expectations, things that exist-before and can operate-without any formal legal text... Just not as well. In other words, the relationship is more like recipes versus cooking. People cooked foods first-- possibly many many times--and then formalized them later with documentation and rules to help make an outcome transferable or fast. However, it would be a mistake to think that just because recipes are ubiquitous, they are a prerequisite for the process.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  thou nobody ever got put in jail because he defied the recipe
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    King Henry III disagrees [0], but arguably that's both. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale
agumonkey 3y ago
Hehe, I felt this slightly a few times in the recent years. Economy is also a large scale self adjusting optimizer, logistical neural network ?
Reflecticon 3y ago
Lawyer here and even though I know just a little about programming, I also always think that laws, contracts etc are like code running on society. Only when people fight over it and go to court, you run it on a "computer" but we only can test it beforehand running on human imagination. I'm very excited about chatgpt and it's capabilities to finally have a test environment for clauses where we can ask of ambiguity of terms, cases we haven't considered in the law/agreement and contradictions within the document. If we could have an ide for lawyers, that would be great too.

bubba12321 3y ago

Try also, "The Legal Singularity" by two law professors from the University of Toronto https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intelligence-Radically/dp/B0C7DT6627 https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...

eimrine 3y ago

I like your illustrations.