The letter that the authors submitted to Maryland's attorney general (http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/legal/facebook/MDAG.pdf http://james.grimmelmann.net/fi

The letter that the authors submitted to Maryland's attorney general (http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/legal/facebook/MDAG.pdf http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/legal/facebook/MDAG.pdf) point out that Maryland's HB 917 -- which essentially applies the federal Common Rule to private companies who do business in Maryland -- defines "research" as "a systematic investigation ... designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge." That definition is so vague that practically any sort of interaction with a person in which any information about the interaction is recorded and analyzed can be construed as research. If a Girl Scout troop makes a graph of which neighborhoods buy the most cookies ... boom, that's research on human subjects. I'd be interested to know whether any entity has been prosecuted for violating HB 917. I can't imagine that the extreme vagueness of the definition would hold up against a determined challenge. What puzzles me is why James Grimmelman, J.D., and Leslie Meltzer Henry, J.D., think that the ultra-vague definition of "research" is legally tenable. Like, can't they anticipate the objections to the definition -- that it effectively bans all sorts of everyday actions that no reasonable person wants to subject to these sort of legal hurdles?