[wos] policing free licenses and code with AI

[Saul Albert]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 02:02:13PM +0200, Andrea Glorioso wrote:
>     > This seems to be part of a general trend towards
>     > identification. Spidering everything into the databases of
>     > search engines was the thing of the 1990s. Now all this gets
>     > fingerprinted and tracked: music, software. Next thing you know
>     > and teachers can do a fuzzy- logic search for the originals that
>     > their students have plagiarized.
> 
>     > Just curious whether there are any freedom-enhancing aspects
>     > about this or if it's just good for IP management and
>     > surveilance.

An Mertens, Belgian author, wrote a sci-fi short story that extrapolates
on the idea of legal AI 'bots', living with us, checking for
contraventions of copyright and other misdemeanours in everyday speech
or thought. It's online here:

http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/Bang

> I have my doubts  whether automated systems, given current technology,
> can truly  capture the complexities  of the law,   but systems such as
> this can at least provide  a good start  from where to conduct  actual
> legal analysis.

I mentioned this idea to a sharp corporate contracts lawyer I met in a
pub and briefly described to him the kinds of legal mechanisms that a
Semantic Web approach to knowledge management would make possible, some
ideas that were outlined in the conclusions of the Freemasons of the
Future text: http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/TfOtFdraft1.1 .
When I described the CC licenses to him and their emphasis on using RDF,
his eyes glowed red. 

Maybe a dystopian short story competition would be a nice feature of WOS
:)

Cheers,

Saul.
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