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Primitive artificial intelligence indicted for unlawful practise of law!

Wednesday 07 March 2007 at 08:32 am
No, I'm not kidding.

One Henry Ihejirika developed a web application called Ziinet, which was an expert system for bankruptcy law that provided a service to whomever could pay the $216us charge for 60 days of access. The idea was that you paid your fee to log into the web application and hammer in the information relevant to your bankruptcy proceedings. The application would analyse your situation, draw up affadavits (presumably drawing upon a database of pre-written statements and paragraphs - if you write enough papers of any kind, it only stands to reason that re-using parts of older papers is the most efficient way of writing), generate forms, and present them to you to sign, notarise, and file.

The application was a little too good at its job, unfortunately; all software has bugs, and Ziinet made a couple of mistakes on one customer's bankruptcy paperwork. When push came to shove, the customer blamed the web application for the mistakes, so the Federal Court of California declared that Ziinet was too sophisticated to be considered a clerical assistance application and indicted Ihejirika for practising law without a license. It seems that the court did not draw much of a distinction between the developer and the software developed (which could be a scary legal precedent) and took him to the cleaners. Ihejirika is henceforth forbidden from providing such services in the future, fined, and fleeced of everything he'd made with his expert system. Appeals in the 9th Circuit Court of California last week upheld this decision. Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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five comments recorded.

On the other hand, this could be a useful precedent. Since it was the developer cited – rather than, say, the hosting service or the customer – then if I’m found to have child pornography on my computer there may be precedent to indict Microsoft rather than me, especially if it can be shown to have downloaded without user interaction.

Hasufin - 07 03 07 - 09:33 - Reply to comment?

In that case, it would be more likely that the developer of the malware that dropped said porn all over your box would be liable. However, we all know how easy it is to bring the authors of malware to justice…

On that note, there is a similiar case before the court right now where a substitute teacher was using a networked system in the classroom, and porn started popping up on the screen. All reports suggest that the system was infected with malware, and had been for some time, but the controversy is that the forensics team botched their jobs horribly and damaged evidence so much that even the prosecution couldn’t make any use of it.

The Doctor (URL) - 07 03 07 - 10:40 - Reply to comment?

Yeah, Iv’e heard about that case.

Here’s another one: Justice for Matt

Short version is this: Police became convinced that someone at this household was distributing child pornography. They confiscated the family computer and found 8 pornographic pictures which they claim to be underage (me, I’m dubious – your typical porn site has 10-20 pictures, I truly have trouble believe anyone collecting would have a mere 8). The 16-yr-old son admitted that he had recently joined a Yahoo group to view normal porn.

In spite of being unable to determine who was using the comptuer at any given time, that the coputer had been compromised with multiple trojans, and a general lack of evidence, the DA continued to pursue the boy, eventually stating in short “We don’t care about the original issue, you’re going to cop to something or we’ll never quit”. He ended up pleading guilty to selling a copy of playboy to another teen.

Hasufin - 07 03 07 - 14:30 - Reply to comment?

Oh, yeah. You don’t allow HTML except blold and italics…

http://www.justice4matt.com/ExecutiveSum..

Hasufin - 07 03 07 - 14:30 - Reply to comment?

The words ‘witch hunt’ come immediately to mind. This reminds me of the West Memphis Three, in that they wanted someone to pin this on, and they went out of their way to find something: http://www.wm3.org/

It’s scary, how clueless law enforcement can be these days. There are legal procedures in place for information forensics, and have been for a number of years now. There is no excuse for how they handled that case, or what they did.

The Doctor (URL) - 08 03 07 - 12:40 - Reply to comment?


  
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