[anigbrowl]

No it isn't. It's part of the superordinate clause (a), and you can tell that because the subclause of (ii) that you mention has further subclauses ((A),(B),(c)) which end with a period. Think about how this would be indented:

  1. *Blah blah blah.* Blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah:
    (a) blah blah blah; blah blah, blah blah blah where
      (i) blah blah, or
      (ii) blah blah blah, blah:
        (A) blah,
        (B) blah blah, or
        (C) blah blah blah.

      Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah.  *<< this is still part of subclause (1)(a)*

    (b) Blah blah blah [...]

One of the depressing aspects of this whole TPP/TTIP debate here on HN is that although most people here either write code for a living or at least know how to do so, very few have ever thought through the fact that there are rules of scope in legal documents as well.

I appreciate that such documents are very confusing, even more so when they are in draft form and include multiple 'live' options (rather like improperly declared constants in programming), and more so again when they're presented as just a big wall of text without any typographic structuring that would make them easier to read. Parsing such complex documents is difficult; if it were easy then courts would be less busy than they are. But a great deal of the 'analysis' of the impending trade agreements (as well as other legal stuff that is sometimes posted to HN) seems to start with an assumption about meaning or purpose, and then go through the text looking for clues to back it up. This is a fast track to self-deception and eventual defeat in the event of a dispute.

I'm not a lawyer, just a law nerd.

[ne0n]

I have a question that's off topic from the TPP/TTIP debate. I have another friend that is interested in this topic. Do you think it's possible to create a computer parsable Domain-Specific Language for legal documents? Or maybe to cover a certain subset of legal document types?

[roel_v]

No. (well, I guess it depends on your definition of 'possible').

(have degrees in software engineering & law, have during law school reviewed much of the existing literature in this field from several societies/journals, of which one of my professors was a prominent contributor; there has been much published on this type of stuff, and none of it is deemed (even by the people working on it) remotely feasible for implementation or actual use.)

Start searching e.g. by reading the publications of http://jurix.nl and the literature referenced therein; or google scholar'ing on 'legal ontologies' and going from there.

[anigbrowl]

I disagree with Roel_v and see no fundamental reason why legal texts could not be formalized, but there are good arguments for both positions. Also, he's more knowledgeable than I am so you should discount my opinion a bit. But not too much because I'm super smart :-p

https://computationallegalstudies.com is the blog of law professor Dean Katz, and will probably be of considerable interest to you.

[superuser2]

Try to create a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered fraud, without invoking the concept of reasonable or relying on the contents of the alleged perpetrator's mind.

Human judgement turns out to be pretty important in deciding whether or not something is a crime. That judgement is influenced by argument, guided by precedent, and reviewable by higher authorities, but it is ultimately judgement. It's somewhere between very, very hard and impossible to write laws that catch the edge cases without ensnaring innocent people or being subject to human interpretation.

[IanCal]

While true, I think there could be significant merit in defining one where no complex decision is made by a machine at all. When trying to read these legal documents I struggle a bit with holding all the various bits in my head, a section only applies if A and B are true, and C is over 16, but not if ...

Those same definitions will be used several times. Could they be extracted out? Could we have something that we're able to turn into a series of questions that a lay person could have at least a crack at? I've seen some of those done for tax law in the UK and it really simplifies things (although these are made manually).

Basically, keep humans making those decisions of what is malicious or wilful, and have the law written in such a way as to allow (but not require) a computer to take and combine those decisions.

[nickbauman]

Laws mean only what they are interpreted to mean. So, as in the drift of interpretation of the 2nd Amendment over the years (for example), any formal DSL you could devise would be at the mercy of any sustaining cultural narrative going on around any particular law in question. People aren't computers.

[walterbell]

Thanks for the terminology correction on indented sentences.

Do you agree that the quoted text was in the scope of the "devices" (ii) branch rather than in the scope of the "circumvention" (i) branch?

[anigbrowl]

Neither; as I said, I think it's part of a superordinate (higher) clause, of which (i) and (ii) were subclauses. Mind, I am just going off the short extract on the Freezenet page- I didn't bother to dig out the original document and work back from page 63 to get back to the very top context. I've decided to wait the 30 days for the final text to appear and then make a decision to support it or not based on the final text rather than a draft.

[walterbell]

I've found a draft with indentation (QQ.G.10) that supports your point. Thanks for the explanation.

http://keionline.org/sites/default/files/Section-G-Copyright...

[anigbrowl]

You're welcome. I think it's a great shame (and probably no accident) that really important stuff like legislation that can affect the lives of millions of people is still presented in a form that makes interpretation extremely difficult for non-specialists.

[walterbell]

A variation on the legal-DSL inquiry upthread: what do you think about open-source code that ships with open-source legal terms-of-service which are enforced by the code? Even something as simple as attribution for CC-BY-4.0 does not have a "reference implementation" or lint-checker.

Some attempts have been made at Finance DSLs, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23448/dsl-in-finance

[anigbrowl]

I'm very interested in this subject, but not especially expert at it, plus I haven't kept up with the technology on a daily basis for over a year, so I have no clue what the cutting-edge trends are right now. There is a HNer that has organized a couple of conferences around this theme at Berkeley and Stanford in the last few years. I will try to do some catching up on the issue and post anything cool I find.