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When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

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Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#131

Post by sunstone »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #66
parsimo2010 wrote: post #7

These are interesting scenarios, but let's not forget that the rules are only binding under the threat of being caught and punished. They aren't like the laws of physics. So if a lawyer isn't supposed to engage in trickery, they might do so anyway, especially if they think they can get away with it and their client happens to be a rich criminal who pays them extra to do shady stuff. Source: Lawyers wouldn't have the…

> Lawyers wouldn't have the reputation they do if all the members of the club had integrity. Some anecdotes: - A company I started, hired a big-brand SV legal firm, super expensive. We thought they would be great. But we were so little to them, it was sometimes even hard to get a timely response. In the end we stopped using them, but not before we signed a bunch of documents they reviewed and told us were fine to sig…

I've dealt with almost two dozen lawyers over the past twenty years and I am quite knowledgeable about the practices of stock brokers. In both cases it seems that the chances of getting a practitioner, at random, who will work with you in good faith is closer to 20%. Getting both honesty and capable ability is lower.

And then there is the family law lawyers ("it's not family and it's not law" according to one) but it does line a lot of lawyer's pockets at the expense of the public, at least in the five eyes. Most other jurisdictions have opted for a saner system.

So, yes, it's jungle out there. Imagine if your doctor prescribed medicine that would make you sicker so that he could charge you more later. If you don't have good reliable connections going in you really need to be careful, shop around until you find someone who seems good and honest, and then pray.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#132

Post by lmilcin »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #129
lmilcin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... certainly not omissions. The job of a lawyer is not to lay down facts but to know and understand the law and use the knowledge to argue on behalf of their client. It is prosecutor's job to lay down facts without lying or omitting. In fact lawyers have obligation to omit facts when it is a wish of their client.

The scenario I’m quoting from seemed like it was a lawsuit. In that scenario I think it’s clear that omissions could reasonably be grounds for disbarment. I happen to think that filing a sufficiently brazenly frivolous lawsuit should result in the lawyer who filed it being disbarred. Whether or not a lawsuit is frivolous can easily hinge on omitting information, like suing someone for trespassing on your property but…

I am not versed in US law (I am neither a lawyer nor from US). Generally, lawyers are not exempt from the law and can face professional responsibility (called disbarment in US).

Lying to a judge is grounds for disbarment but in general a lawyer has no obligation to verify clients' statements.

It would usually be difficult to prove what the lawyer did or did not know but, hypothetically, if you could prove that the lawyer knew that there was no trespassing then a statement to the court to the contrary can be construed to be a lie and result in consequences.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#133

Post by mleonhard »

dependenttypes wrote: post #69
ta1234567890 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawyers wouldn't have the reputation they do if all the members of the club had integrity. Some anecdotes: - A company I started, hired a big-brand SV legal firm, super expensive. We thought they would be great. But we were so little to them, it was sometimes even hard to get a timely response. In the end we stopped using them, but not before we signed a bunch of documents they reviewed and told us were fine to sig…

I do not want to dismiss what you are saying (in fact I find it extremely interesting) but don't 80%+ of people in all professions (or even out in society) just suck? I am more surprised that you consider 50% to be the minimum of bad lawyers rather than a higher percentage.

Or most people do poor work 80% of the time and good work 20% of the time. I think most people are capable of doing good work, if they are motivated and free of distractions.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#134

Post by woofie11 »

tptacek wrote: post #40
woofie11 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried filing a misconduct compliant with a bar association? You'll get just about as far as a police violence compliant with the local PD. The bar is there to serve the lawyers, like any guild or union. For the most part, there are no checks on lawyer ethics.

Isn't the bar association a guild or union? The state court system hears serious ethics complaints.

For the most part, complaints are handled through the Bar. Unless something is a press-worthy scandal, they are promptly ignored by most Bars. The goal is to protect lawyers, not clients. A press-worthy case hurts lawyers. Normal scams are, well, what most lawyers do.

Suing a lawyer for malpractice in courts is very tough. There are all sorts of barriers. For example, let's say your lawyer fails to file legal paperwork on-time, and you lose a case. You can sue, but to collect damages:

* You have to show that in the alternative case, you would have won. The lawyer will argue you would have lost in either case.

* The case against your lawyer will likely impact your main case, and not in ways you like.

If your lawyer charges billable hours without actually working -- something which is standard practice among lawyers in my community -- you need to be able to prove that. It's the culture here:

* I've been to lunch with lawyers who bragged they were billing someone else for the time

* Lawyers routinely double-bill if e.g. handling client emails on a cell phone while in court for another client. ). How do you do that?

So it happens all the time, and I've gotten insane bills when nothing was done. You can't prove that in court, though. There's no case. And so on.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#135

Post by woofie11 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #101
woofie11 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of lawyers. Most lawyers in law firms are just as unethical just as often as their reputation suggests. There are high-integrity lawyers out there, and if you find one, cling onto them. They're out there, but they're rare. A much more likely explanation are misaligned incentive structures, combined with a protective guild-like bar organization which lawyers belong to.

Any professional in a competitive field fakes immense selective pressure to be unethical. It doesn't matter how honest one is, the system will select for the cheater. This goes for lawyers, bicyclists, tradespeople, anywhere where the client or victims of externalities can't verify the quality of the work and hold them accountable.

I think the "competitive" piece is more important than the "can't verify" piece. I'd add academics, politicians, and executives to that list.

A lot of professions are structured like pyramid schemes, with partner/tenure/presidency/CEO at the top, and crap at the bottom.

On the flip side, my experience is most tradespeople are quite scrupulous, not because I can verify the work, but due to lack of competition. If my handyman takes 30% longer to work, he perhaps makes 30% less money, but life goes on. If an academic misses tenure, or a politician gets knocked out of office, careers end.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#136

Post by pabs3 »

Iv wrote: post #104
pabs3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any more info about the licensing issues around deep learning models, I'd be very interested to read it. In exchange, here is a link to the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy: https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy

Well, I'd be happy to have someone to chat with and exchange ideas about it. I am currently digging that rabbit hole that seems to be basically uncharted waters. I would like to find a way to make true open source deep learning models. Debian legal newsletter [1] and lwn[2] have interesting takes on the relevance of GPL. To them, putting a trained model under the GPL implicates that you have to open your dataset too,…

The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models. The biggest problem with the policy is they do not address the economic disparity that means only folks with a lot of money can train a model even if they had all the training software, drivers and source data under a free license etc. Perhaps Debian can get enough donated compute time that we can solve this though.

The products of compilation seem to be copyrightable, otherwise software piracy wouldn't be prosecutable. Perhaps the same would apply to trained models.

Do you have a link to those fair use rulings? Also note that fair use is an American concept and doesn't apply in many countries, some of which have similar but more restricted concepts. Also, I wouldn't consider a model produced under your example as a free model, that would be more of a ToxicCandy model in the Debian ML Policy parlance.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#137

Post by pabs3 »

pabs3 wrote: post #136
Iv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd be happy to have someone to chat with and exchange ideas about it. I am currently digging that rabbit hole that seems to be basically uncharted waters. I would like to find a way to make true open source deep learning models. Debian legal newsletter [1] and lwn[2] have interesting takes on the relevance of GPL. To them, putting a trained model under the GPL implicates that you have to open your dataset too,…

The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models. The biggest problem with the policy is they do not address the economic disparity that means only folks with a lot of money can train a model even if they had all the training software, drivers and source data under a free license etc. Perhaps Debian can get enough donated compute time that we can solve this though. Th…

Some links to Debian mailing list discussions:

https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/33417ce2bcf9b6a0efaf47... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20190608184309.GA10146... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/f544829dcd6c0f92ea11cd... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20180712123524.GA25751...

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#138

Post by dodobirdlord »

lmilcin wrote: post #132
dodobirdlord wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario I’m quoting from seemed like it was a lawsuit. In that scenario I think it’s clear that omissions could reasonably be grounds for disbarment. I happen to think that filing a sufficiently brazenly frivolous lawsuit should result in the lawyer who filed it being disbarred. Whether or not a lawsuit is frivolous can easily hinge on omitting information, like suing someone for trespassing on your property but…

I am not versed in US law (I am neither a lawyer nor from US). Generally, lawyers are not exempt from the law and can face professional responsibility (called disbarment in US). Lying to a judge is grounds for disbarment but in general a lawyer has no obligation to verify clients' statements. It would usually be difficult to prove what the lawyer did or did not know but, hypothetically, if you could prove that the la…

A lawyer could be disbarred for lying to a judge, but in practice it is extremely infrequent that lawyers are disbarred, even for relatively severe misconduct. I also personally think that the standards for what constitutes misconduct should be more broad, and should extend to cover bad faith use of the legal system for purposes other than seeking legal rulings, like harassing people or wasting their time or money. The existence of default judgements, where the defendant has to appear and present a defense or be found responsible in even the most flagrantly illegitimate of cases incentivizes lawyers to carry out filings in bad faith.

For example, lawyers in the US routinely file or threaten to file defamation suits in scenarios where the law is clear that no defamation has occurred. I feel that in such situations the most charitable interpretation is that the lawyer is an idiot, and the less charitable interpretation is that the lawyer is a criminal. When a judge considers and ultimately dismisses such a suit, two options present themselves. Either the lawyer is so incompetent as to think that the suit had legitimate grounds, in which case they should lose the ability to file such suits, or the lawyer is maliciously exploiting the legal system for the purpose of harassment, and should similarly lose the ability to file such suits. The fact that judges largely refrain from sanctioning lawyers for even the most severe misconduct results in a world where wealthy individuals are frequently able to use the legal system or the threat of the legal system to harass individuals like journalists into not discussing their activities that are of public interest.

A similar example manifests in patent law, where patent trolls can pursue expensive sham litigation with impunity, to the extent that an entire market exists based on shaking companies down by threatening legal action and offering a settlement for less than the company will have to pay in legal fees to eventually prevail against the sham accusation.

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#139

Post by Iv »

pabs3 wrote: post #136
Iv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd be happy to have someone to chat with and exchange ideas about it. I am currently digging that rabbit hole that seems to be basically uncharted waters. I would like to find a way to make true open source deep learning models. Debian legal newsletter [1] and lwn[2] have interesting takes on the relevance of GPL. To them, putting a trained model under the GPL implicates that you have to open your dataset too,…

The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models. The biggest problem with the policy is they do not address the economic disparity that means only folks with a lot of money can train a model even if they had all the training software, drivers and source data under a free license etc. Perhaps Debian can get enough donated compute time that we can solve this though. Th…

Thanks for the links below, reading these opinions took me two more hours of my time but helped me grind some thoughts!

First a quick answer to your two last questions. Programs and binaries are widely recognized as copyrightable. What I am wondering is whether the action of compiling a program constitutes a contribution worthy of protection and of additional copyright. To give a concrete example, imagine I am a company that uses gcc and big machines to provide compilation as a service. You feed it a BSD-licensed source code. My server returns a binary on which I claim a proprietary copyright. Are you allowed to dismiss it as being just the result of a totally deterministic and automated process and reclaim it as BSD? I would argue yes but it could be a non-obvious court case.

Anyway, I don't think I agree on the comparison between compilation and training.

> Do you have a link to those fair use rulings?

I was thinking about this [1] ruling (Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.) in which Google scanned commercial books and used this obviously non-free dataset to provide in-text search mechanisms. I am pretty bitter about the fact that one of the main reason for the favorable outcome (Google won) was that the judge estimated it had an "obvious" usefulness when the ruling finally happened, some 10 years after the scanning started at which point it was certainly not appearing obvious to non-tech people. So Google had to prove a tech while in a legal grayzone, a luxury orgs like Debian may not have.

------------------

Now for the real meat :-)

> The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models

Actually, I am wondering if they are not a bit blinded by the way the GPL works and if they don't constraint themselves a bit artificially by imaginary legal precedent.

They all seem to assume that a trained model will be recognized as a compiled binary, but I see at least 5 competing comparisons that were proposed and could hold ground legally:

1. Trained models as compiled binary 2. Compilation of facts as proposed here [2]. I find it pretty persuasive even if its author dismisses it for what I think is not a good argument. 3. Rendered 2D image from a 3D model 4. 2D photograph of a real 3D object 5. Training as a copyrightable creative creation [3]

It is understandable that Debian maintainers think about everything in terms of programs and source but I feel they shoehorn a bit that notion in the case of machine learning and may not realize how much more flexible the legal framework actually is.

Admittedly, I am less interested in the consequences of slapping the GPL on a trained model than I am about finding a way to solve the potential problems caused by bad actors in the field, just like FOSS did it for regular software. I am strongly suspecting we may have to write a viral license adapted to ML.

One of my example is how would one go to prevent one's work being used by OpenAI the day they decide to refuse releasing their trained models? Or to prevent helping Google or Facebook gained an even more dominant position by adding data to an already good model?

We benefit a lot from the fact that, right now, there seems to be genuinely good will from wealthy actors to contribute to the research community but it feels to me like a Mexican standoff. What happens when one decides to run off with what is published and secretly improves it for commercial gains?

I must say that I have been happily surprised by how much things are free for use right now, from research, algorithms, frameworks and trained models. We avoided a lot of dystopias, probably through some unsung heroe researchers who imposed openness to their employers upon being hired.

The risk still exists though, as all this openness can be reversed on a whim. Basically, I am wondering how we can put all the chances on our sided that the first AGI will benefit the humanity instead of its owner?

Sorry for the wall of text, but if you are still there and would like to continue that discussion, here is fine, but real time discussion is also fine, you can shoot me a mail at yves.quemener@gmail.com and we can do Hangout or Signal from there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/07/msg00175.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/05/msg00380.html

Re: When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)

#140

Post by lmilcin »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #138
lmilcin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not versed in US law (I am neither a lawyer nor from US). Generally, lawyers are not exempt from the law and can face professional responsibility (called disbarment in US). Lying to a judge is grounds for disbarment but in general a lawyer has no obligation to verify clients' statements. It would usually be difficult to prove what the lawyer did or did not know but, hypothetically, if you could prove that the la…

A lawyer could be disbarred for lying to a judge, but in practice it is extremely infrequent that lawyers are disbarred, even for relatively severe misconduct. I also personally think that the standards for what constitutes misconduct should be more broad, and should extend to cover bad faith use of the legal system for purposes other than seeking legal rulings, like harassing people or wasting their time or money. T…

Bad faith and basically anything that is only in your mind is such a difficult thing to prove and that's why it is so problematic.

There are judges who are sensitive to it and will go out of their way to punish it. I think part of the problem is that there are many occasions to "fix" the process by getting case resolved in a state that is known to be lenient to certain kind of behavior (very popular with patent trolls).

I don't think there is going to be an easy solution that could be written in law. Rather, the solution is to publicize "bad faith" behavior and lenient treating by judges.

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