Speak To My Robolawyer

from the clickwrap-this dept

The idea isn't new, but Mark Rasch is another person suggesting that a way to deal with all these "clickwrap agreements" that you never read and which are often used to justify installing spyware/adware on your computer, is to have a digital "legal agent" that reads all of the online legal mumbo jumbo and tells you what to agree to. The idea is that you set your preferences and tolerances, and the agent reads through the clickwrap agreements and privacy policies and stops you from agreeing to give your first born and half your future pre-tax revenue to the creators of some random software utility you downloaded on a whim. The problem, of course, is that this is much easier to suggest than to actually implement. While there have been efforts like P3P, getting everyone to agree on a standard format for this information that a bot could read and understand is unlikely. Creating a bot that could understand even non-standard legalese is unlikely. Simply banning all sites that don't conform to the standard is one way around this, but could cause a lot of collateral damage. In the end, it's quite a statement to realize that the only possible way to deal with all the legal language you run into is using a computer program. Doesn't that suggest there's a much bigger problem in how these legal documents are created, rather than how they're read?