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Creating CoReO, the Computer Assisted Copyright Reform Observatory

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Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking

Part of the book series: Legisprudence Library ((LEGIS,volume 2))

Abstract

The paper proposes an approach to AI assisted law reform , that tries to align research in Artificial Intelligence and Law with the jurisprudential philosophy of Luc Wintgens. Taking a holistic, system-oriented view, we propose a visualisation based link analysis that allows lawmakers to identify those parts of the legal system where the smallest amount of change has the largest effect.

We are grateful for the support by the RCUK funded CREATE network www.create.ac.uk, and in particular for the contribution our research assistant, Laurence Diver, provided for the research and editing of this paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

  2. 2.

    We follow in this the highly influential analysis by Robert Cover, laid out first in his 1986 essay “Violence and the Word”. For further details and discussion on the notion of law as inherently an exercise in (justified) violence the reader is referred to the papers in Brady and Garver (1991), Sarat and Kearns (1992), and Sarat (2001).

  3. 3.

    Fuller considered the relative stability of law an aspect of its “inner morality”. Herbert Hart, famously, disagreed, calling it a mere functional requirement of efficacy (Hart 1957). For our purposepurposes, the precise classification is irrelevant,; what matters is that rapid change in the law is a problem for the legal order.

  4. 4.

    Scott Wortely, in personal communication. Wortely was one of the Strathclyde academics who started to compile and annotate the rapidly changing rules. A description of the background to the problem can be found in Aitken (1997), which also illustrates the speed with which rules were created and repealed at that time.

  5. 5.

    Advocate General in Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH v Einfuhr- und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel. [1970] ECR 1125 Case 11/70.

  6. 6.

    https://www.direct.gov.uk/prod-consum-dg/groups/dg-digitalassets/@dg/@en/@motor/documents/digitalasset/dg-180212.pdf

  7. 7.

    Exceptions to this could be particularly complex and complicated pieces of legislation, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the US, which had not been read by most of the politicians who voted for or against it. Here, even a syntactic parsing exercise that tells the decision maker how many new duties, privileges, exceptions etcetera are created might result in better informed judgments.

  8. 8.

    The Constitution of the Republic of Estonia RT 1992, 26, 349; RT I, 27.04.2011, 2, §20.

  9. 9.

    Leo Võhandu was given a task to categorise living beings of nature by their characteristics. There are many different caharacteristics, for instance, giving a birth or laying eggs; flying or living in water, etc. He made a cross table with kinds of beings and their characteristics. If a being had a described characteristic, then it was marked as “1” and if a characteristic did not exist, then it was marked as “0”. Such tables are hard for the human eye to process. Võhandu came up with a methodology how connections can be visualized by creating a maximum connectivity tree so that concentrated information spots can be visually captured.

  10. 10.

    The method described earlier enables to determine similarity between different legal acts as whole, whereas now we were interested in establishing connections between legal norms of different legal acts. The similarity of legal acts as whole was discussed in Täks et al. (2011).

  11. 11.

    Copyright Act RT 1992, 49, 615; RT I, 28.12.2011, 1 (hereinafter Copyright Act).

  12. 12.

    Law of Obligations Act RT I 2001, 81, 487; RT I, 05.04.2013, 1 (hereinafter Law of Obligations Act).

  13. 13.

    Copyright Act, §14.

  14. 14.

    See e.g. C-162/10 Phonographic Performance (Ireland) limited v. Ireland; C-306/05 Sociedad General de Autores y Editores de Espana (SGAE) versus Rafael Hoteles SA.

  15. 15.

    Exceptions have to conform to the three-step-test. Article 9 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 9 September 1886. Paris Act of 24 July 1971, as amended on 28 September 1979. WIPO, Geneva; §17 of the Copyright Act.

  16. 16.

    Copyright Act §14 (3).

  17. 17.

    Law of Obligations Act, §§452 (1); 490 (2); 677 (3); 846.

  18. 18.

    Ibid. §452 (1).

  19. 19.

    Ibid.

  20. 20.

    Penal Code RT I 2001,61,364; RT I 29.12.2011,1, §212.“§212. Insurance fraud(1) A person who intentionally brings about an insured event or causes a misconception of the occurrence of an insured event with the intention to receive an insurance indemnity from the insurer shall be punished by a pecuniary punishment or up to 5 years imprisonment.(2) The same act, if committed by a legal person, is punishable by a pecuniary punishment.”

  21. 21.

    Ibid. §223. “§223. Unlawful direction of works or objects of related rights towards public (1) Unlawful public performance, showing, transmission, re-transmission or making available to the public or a work or an object of related rights for commercial purposes is punishable by a pecuniary punishment or up to one year of imprisonment. (2) The same act, if performed by using a pirated copy, is punishable by a pecuniary punishment or up to 3 years imprisonment. (3) An act provided for in subsection (1) or (2) of this section, if committed by a legal person, is punishable by a pecuniary punishment. (4) The court shall confiscate the object which was the direct object of the offence provided for in subsection (2) of this section.”

  22. 22.

    Copyright Act §14 (6).

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Law of Obligations Act, §§452 (1); 490 (2); 672; 677 (3); 846.

  25. 25.

    Copyright Act, §67 (1).

  26. 26.

    Law of Obligations Act, §§452 (1); 490 (2); 677 (3); 846.

  27. 27.

    Copyright Act, §32 (1).

  28. 28.

    Law of Obligations Act, §8 (2).

  29. 29.

    In particular in continental legal systems such as German law explicitly recognized as a method of interpretation. See e.g. Rüthers and Fischer (2010), at 147a.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tallinn Technical University, Tallin, Estonia

    Ermo Täks & Addi Rull

  2. Estonian Human Rights Centre, Tallin, Estonia

    Anni Säär

  3. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Burkhard Schäfer

Authors
  1. Ermo Täks
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  2. Addi Rull
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  3. Anni Säär
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  4. Burkhard Schäfer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ermo Täks .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law and Administration, Kraków, Poland

    Michał Araszkiewicz

  2. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law and Administration, Kraków, Poland

    Krzysztof Płeszka

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Täks, E., Rull, A., Säär, A., Schäfer, B. (2015). Creating CoReO, the Computer Assisted Copyright Reform Observatory. In: Araszkiewicz, M., Płeszka, K. (eds) Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking. Legisprudence Library, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19575-9_18

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