> Carnegie Mellon University estimated the median length of a single online privacy policy, for example, to be 2,514 words. This would take 10 minutes to read.
That seems extremely generous. That's a reading rate of 252 WPM through legalese. Wikipedia[1] seems to say that studies say we can only do 180 WPM off a monitor while proofreading, presumably normal prose:
> While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 WPM on a monitor.
I presume legalese will take longer to comprehend. Additionally, that's the privacy policy. We need to also add in the Terms of Service:
> the iTunes Terms and Conditions fluctuated in length from 14,000 words to a whopping 23,000 words.
At the above reading speed (ignoring the fact that this is legalese) that's 1h 17m to 2h 8m of reading. The legalese will slow you down if you actual seek to comprehend the words in front of your eyes. Two-and-half to three hours of reading? The user will never read the ToS.
In my ideal fantasy world, we wouldn't have terms of service; instead, we would be given a structured 'legal code' file, which encodes the terms and conditions as unambiguously as possible.
I could add my personal preferences to my local licenseconfig; for instance, I want to own everything created using software on my machine, and I don't want companies to be able to sell my data, regardless of whether it is anonymized.
Now when I install software, my license daemon alerts me if that software's legal code might conflict with my preferences, and gives me the option of clarifying my configuration, making an exception, or cancelling the installation.
> we wouldn't have terms of service; instead, we would be given a structured 'legal code' file
They're called terms and they're parsed by meat parsers. We call them lawyers and judges. They are more powerful than any computer. The system they've built has been working for hundreds of years. We have lots of people who understand how it works.
If you make the contract the code, you just replace lawyers with coders. You'll still have drafting errors [1]. You'll still have things looking like X but really doing Y [2]. And you'll still need somewhere to adjudicate conflicts.
The law is fine. Our backlog is in the parsers [3]. Replacing lawyers and judges with AI seems more desirable than some "code is contract" society.
He's asking for a standard, not an API to various oracle machines currently in existence.
The "system that works for years" relies on subjectively-defined terms often fiated by those oracle machines (thus only deterministic given the 'institutional knowledge' of 'accepted practice' depending on various jurisdictions) which aren't actually written down or encoded anywhere.
Because anyone who would be in a position to see that and write those down usually has a job instead acting as an oracle machine for decisions made based on that knowledge.
And that's just one of the gotchas where that's concerned. Taking the 'ideal' solution of just encoding 'common practices' ad-hoc as issues arise, you might as well just roll your own at that point.
We have predictable standards codified in statute and case law. Most cases settle predictably. A few make new law. These receive disproportionate media attention because they are defining edge cases. It doesn't matter if your law is in code or text at that point. If you have an investigatory law saying "books and papers," and a prosecutor seizes an iPhone, you have to produce new law.
This ambiguity is a product of mapping heterogeneity between abstract concepts and the real world. There will never be agreement on what all words mean. "Is this a chair? Yes. Is that a chair? No, it's art. Who says? Let's debate." That is a product of language.
> which aren't actually written down or encoded anywhere
Here's a random, recent Supreme Court opinion [1]. I don't have a legal background; I find it highly readable. Furthermore, the citations are pretty easy to follow.
> anyone who would be in a position to see that and write those down usually has a job instead acting as an oracle machine
Not everyone trained in law is a legislator. (Or judge.) Many legislators, judges, lawyers, professors, students and random people opine on the law in books, blogs and other materials. This is a public debate. When courts face an edge case, lawyers from both sides cite these materials. After that, once a precedent is set (and recorded), it is respected until a new edge case arises or the statute is revised by the political system.
> This ambiguity is a product of mapping heterogeneity between abstract concepts and the real world. There will never be agreement on what all words mean
And even if there is agreement, these meanings may change over time.
It is not uncommon for laws to be deliberately abstract precisely to accomodate future developments.
> The "system that works for years" relies on subjectively-defined terms often fiated by those oracle machines (thus only deterministic given the 'institutional knowledge' of 'accepted practice' depending on various jurisdictions)
The same could be said about countless technical standards...
> which aren't actually written down or encoded anywhere.
Of course, my idea is wildly simplistic and naïve. But wouldn't it be nice?
I suppose in a sense, using court cases to set precedent is like implementing a regression test: "We found a bug in this law, next time you hit this edge case, treat it like this."
What you're advocating is the "smart contract" delusion.
You're aiming to replace the messy uncertainty of conventional human-mediated legal agreements with the clear, deterministic rigour of computer code. Have you seen how bug-free computer code is in the real world?
Smart contracts are a perennial fascination for technologists working in an area where everything can be determined cleanly and clearly, if only in principle. So the prospect of using computers to sort out all those annoying grey areas in human interaction is tempting: if you don’t understand law (which involves intent) but you do understand code (which does precisely what you tell it to – though probably not precisely what you meant), then you will try to work around law using code.
(You know the uncertainty you're feeling about your life being run by legal documents you don't understand? That's how other people feel about their lives being run by your code.)
Legal issues just don’t work that way – the purpose of law is not to achieve philosophical truth, but to achieve workable results that society can live with. It regularly shocks technologists that the law is fuzzy, circumstantial and indeterminate, and that arbitrary strings of data can in fact be tagged with the intent behind them at the time. Because what a human meant, what they were thinking at the time, is a lot of the point.
For smart contracts to work as advertised, we would need to create a human-equivalent artificial intelligence to understand what people meant the contract to do.
A much-touted advantage of smart contracts is that the code is public, so anyone can check and verify it before engaging with it. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to tell precisely what a program might possibly do without actually running it. (Shellshock lurked in bash for 25 years without being spotted.)
Smart contracts work on the wrong level: they run on facts and not on human intent, but real-life contracts are a codification of human intent, which will always involve argument and ambiguity.
I completely agree. Wouldn't it be nice if code did what we meant instead of what we said too though?
Not everything can be solved with code, but it's fun to think about, and leads down some interesting paths, even if they're ultimately impossible or impractical.
What if we could encode ambiguity? Legal code could have some wiggle room. Of course, you'd want to be able to do things like ask 'Is X legal under Y circumstances' and receive an answer, and at that point you effectively have human-equivalent artificial intelligence.
- P3P, which describes various ways a Web site intends to use your data, and browser preferences for what to allow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
- Debian packages contain license information, and debconf can ask the user to read the license and accept/reject (in the case of non-Free software; Free Software can be used without agreeing to anything). The answers are kept in a database, so if a license has been agreed to it won't be asked again. This is similar to what you're asking, but assumes that there's a small set of possible terms, which projects/organisations reuse over and over.
If you haven't read Accelerando by Charles Stross, you should check it out; that's one of the things it explores--laws, terms of use, and companies being carried out as programs. It's a super cool science fiction story that explores a ton of really out-there ideas, all pretty plausibly.
Just looked that one up, it's book 3/3 in a series, first two being Singular Sky and Iron Sunrise. Do they all touch on this topic? And if not, does Accelerando stand alone well enough to be read without the other two?
> Any software or web page you use is backed by an inscrutable pile of legalese
This isn't the case of all software, fortunately. For free software under the GPL, for instance, you don't need to read the GPL or agree with the GPL to use the software. (The GPL is only giving you additional rights, beyond what copyright already permits.) Specifically, I don't think I am "agreeing" to any terms when using Firefox.
If you use a Linux-based operating system like Debian and free software, you don't need to agree to much legalese, actually.
(OK, this is about terms and conditions, not privacy policies. But privacy policies for free software is about giving additional privacy guarantees -- you are not forced to read it or agree with it.)
You know, just because you take part in or benefit from a system, it doesn't mean you can't critique it at all right? It's better that despite having such terms themselves, that Mozilla's blog chose to highlight a comic that addresses the issue. Your alternative of not casting any stone just dooms us to the status quo and nothing will ever change.
This silly statement is so common that there are comics like these in response:
> You know, just because you take part in or benefit from a system, it doesn't mean you can't critique it at all right?
No, but it does mean your critique is necessarily compromised, if not necessarily in a fatal way. Intellectual honesty requires this compromise be addressed, but contempt is a great deal easier.
Compare the length and complexity of any of those links to any other random legal terms on the internet. I found the Firefox Terms of Use much easier to comprehend than Visual Studio, let alone quite a lot shorter.
That's what I'm seeing. It's better if they break the ideas up, try to understand them from a lay perspective, and then build a graphic novel on that. This will likely get nowhere for general population.
I think you may be seeing this as something it's not.
This is not a group's attempt at making T&Cs readable or understandable. It's not an EFF thing.
This is one guy's answer a challenge he set himself: Terms and Conditions, the text itself, is antithetical to a comic script. So I will make it fit.
This, in my opinion, is more art than anything else. It's something where most of the residents of Silicon X (valley, beach, etc.) will see it as something that it is not. For that reason, I don't think Mozilla was the best place for this to be covered.
EDIT: I forgot to note, this isn't intended to be a graphic novel in the mass-market sense. It's a Drawn & Quarterly publication, whose comics are not what you'd normally expect.
It's a situation/problem that exists in the real world, and affects the rights of users? Does a blog need a reason to write a post?
I feel like the topic is a good one, given that most people don't read the ToS, and if put in comic book form, some of the characters might be saying pretty damning things like, "You give up your constitutional right to a trial by jury by using the service." Most users never see that, and don't know that, yet it affects their rights. Seems like exactly Mozilla (or the EFF's) alley.
Add in that most commercial software use proprietary Tos/EULAs/etc., so nothing like the GPL-for-commercial products exists. Compare to a FOSS project, where the license can be summed up as "MIT": I've read the MIT license, and so now I know what the conditions are, from a mere three bytes. Each and every commercial snowflake has a EULA, and each must be read individually. For example, I Googled for Adobe Flash's, because I remember it onerous. If you do this, you get linked to page 87 of a 304 page document.[1] (In fairness, I seem to remember that only getting the relevant bit during install.)
Because Mozilla's goal is to keep the web open and advocate for personal data privacy. This article fits nicely there with the rest of similarly themed articles on the blog.
Aside from the creative exercise, it is a complete dud argument because Mozilla isn't comparing and contrasting with their own licenses and user agreements.
I mean, does Mozilla even offer album art downloads? Because I don't even get the beef they have with Jobsman's benign T&C.
That seems extremely generous. That's a reading rate of 252 WPM through legalese. Wikipedia[1] seems to say that studies say we can only do 180 WPM off a monitor while proofreading, presumably normal prose:
> While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 WPM on a monitor.
I presume legalese will take longer to comprehend. Additionally, that's the privacy policy. We need to also add in the Terms of Service:
> the iTunes Terms and Conditions fluctuated in length from 14,000 words to a whopping 23,000 words.
At the above reading speed (ignoring the fact that this is legalese) that's 1h 17m to 2h 8m of reading. The legalese will slow you down if you actual seek to comprehend the words in front of your eyes. Two-and-half to three hours of reading? The user will never read the ToS.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_c...