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Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#21
post #14

Does anyone know of any similar works that instead focus on a common law background (US/UK/others) vs civil law (EU/most of the world), that I am understanding this book focuses on? This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here. Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Researc…

What are some of your basic questions about the legal system? Happy to take a shot at answering.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#22
post #13
post #10

This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to double-quote that. At any rate, the book seems to cover UK law, and in fact is published at Oxford?

I'm not sure why you're attracting downvotes for correctly stating that the way law works in the UK is very different than the way it works in continental Europe. The UK is a common law country, like the US, while many EU nations use civil law systems.

The basic mechanisms of UK law are more similar to US law than to French law. The actual laws on the books are probably the other way around, though.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#23
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

Hehe, I felt this slightly a few times in the recent years.

Economy is also a large scale self adjusting optimizer, logistical neural network ?

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#24
post #20
post #10

This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.

It's really hard to compare them. Just like it's hard to compare one country to another. So many factors.

The common way people think about common law versus civil law is this:

-common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal decisions -civil law relies more on regulators.

In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long.

That's the common understanding. These days though both EU and US are converging a bit in their approach.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#25
post #14

Does anyone know of any similar works that instead focus on a common law background (US/UK/others) vs civil law (EU/most of the world), that I am understanding this book focuses on? This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here. Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Researc…

> Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford?

Up until recently, the UK was part of the EU and researchers across the EU received grant funding from EU ERC for various research projects. Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not write a blog then to fill in that gap?

Been thinking about it, but our industry is a service industry and we prefer to get paid to offer our expertise. If I go out on my own and find myself lacking clients, I might.

I hear you, but at the same time, you're addressing a community where we do a lot of free work. The world wouldn't run without the open source unpaid software that we build. I can't critique you for this choice, as it is quite reasonable. But I can say that such publication can help others (potentially a reward in itself) and can help drive customers to you, who recognize that more nuance is necessary than what can ever be expressed in a blog aimed at non-experts.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#27
post #24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to compare them. Just like it's hard to compare one country to another. So many factors.

The common way people think about common law versus civil law is this: -common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal decisions -civil law relies more on regulators. In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long. T…

I wonder if this explains the propensity for lawsuits in the US. It's basically our regulation and enforcement mechanism.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#28
post #10

This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.

The book covers both. I think you were too hasty to get this criticism posted to HN that you made an assumption about the book by its cover. The author is in the UK and this was published by Oxford, which are common law jurisdictions.

For example, I turned to a random part about copyright:

"In the continental European tradition, the focus has been on the author and the work. This understanding of ‘authors’ law’ built on the Age of Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the singularity of creative im- agination of an individual author took precedence over the mundane business interests of a publisher. The idea was that ‘authors’ law’ is part of ‘natural law’ rather than being ‘posited’ by a legislator (positive law). The ‘authors’ right’, in that line of thinking, is constituted by the original act of creation of the author and should not be tied to formalities (such as registration), while the ‘work’ that is created belongs to the ‘author’s domain’. This is a matter of per- sonality rights (droit moral or moral right), rather than a matter of ownership (as Locke would have it).

In the common law that inspired the United Kingdom and the United States, the focus was not on the author and their work, but on the original and the copy. This was less a matter of personality and romantic imagination than a matter of pragmatism. Copyright was simply a choice made by a legislator (positive law), rather than a natural right inherent in the author’s act of cre- ation. This led to the requirement of registration and an emphasis on copy- right as an economic, not a moral right. Here, copyright law is about the domain of the ‘work’ rather than the domain of the ‘author’, and such work is considered original in the sense of not being copied, rather than original in the sense of being creative or novel"

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#29
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

Lawyer here and even though I know just a little about programming, I also always think that laws, contracts etc are like code running on society. Only when people fight over it and go to court, you run it on a "computer" but we only can test it beforehand running on human imagination. I'm very excited about chatgpt and it's capabilities to finally have a test environment for clauses where we can ask of ambiguity of terms, cases we haven't considered in the law/agreement and contradictions within the document. If we could have an ide for lawyers, that would be great too.
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