SIPX is a CodeX research project that aims to establish a marketplace solution for the time-consuming and prohibitively high transaction costs often involved in getting permission to use content. Today, many obstacles exist in traditional mechanisms for content licensing, such as the difficulty of locating the appropriate rightsholders, which commonly result in under-utilization of content or copyright piracy.
SIPX seeks to improve access to content by providing an online licensing marketplace where rightsholders can link up all types of works and negotiate customized licenses more efficiently with users. The system is designed to give rightsholders an additional digital distribution channel, with options to monetize any content on any terms they choose. Users are able to easily identify the conditions on which their desired content can be used, whether it be public domain material for free use, or copyrighted materials for which rightsholders have specified terms and pricing. By automating elements of traditional manual processes, both rightsholders and users can craft their own individualized copyright licenses faster and at reduced costs.
This research project originally commenced under a seed grant through Stanford's Media X center, and continues under a research gift from Media X and its industry affiliates. SIPX is now close to a beta release: the initial deployment focuses on facilitating the licensing of academic educational print materials. Participating Stanford professors will offer their course readers through SIPX, which links to a new print-on-demand system that will be introduced on campus.
Project leader: Roland Vogl
Stanford Online Proxy Reporting Initiative (SOPRI)
The Stanford Online Proxy Initiative aims to greatly simplify the proxy reporting process by providing an online system through which corporations can more easily gather and report proxy information, and shareholders as well as the public at large can more easily access the information via the web. The system will be based on a real-time reporting, structured database that will be continuously updated by the corporate officers in control of the relevant information. This will create a dynamic depository of disclosure items residing in regulation S-K which can be tracked by corporate officers and used in different contexts of corporate reporting. The system will also offer a dynamically adjusting online questionnaire for directors which will allow directors to report their proxy relevant information for all corporations they are affiliated with. An essential, distinguishing feature of the system is its reliance on a formal language for annotating proxy relevant information, which will make it easier to retrieve relevant information. Ultimately, the database will fulfill the need for efficient reporting of proxy information which will make corporations more efficient as well as transparent, which will in turn strengthen investor confidence as well as the public’s confidence in the marketplace.
For more information, please read "Reinventing the Securities Disclosure Regime: Online Questionnaires as Substitutes for Form-Based Filings" by Joseph A. Grundfest and Alan L. Beller
Project leader: Roland Vogl
Digital Department
The focus of the Digital Department project is Policy Oriented Enterprise Management, i.e. automated enterprise management based on semantic data modelling, integrated management and dissemination of enterprise data, and the explicit representation and use of enterprise policies, governmental regulations, and interorganizational contracts. The Digital Department is a living laboratory within which we are studying how computational law can be used within and between organizations.
Project leader: Michael Genesereth
Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity (AiCE)
This project explores the commercial and legal aspects/implications of an intelligent cyberagent and its evolution into an autonomous intelligent cyber entity (AiCE, pronounced "ice"). It evaluates and builds functional and operational schemas for standardizing AiCE with an emphasis on reducing waste of judicial resources, increasing e-commerce transactional certainty and expanding into new frontiers for e-commerce interactivity on B2B, B2C and C2C levels. For more information, please visit the CodeX blog.
Project leader: Eran Kahana
Project CALC (Computer Assisted Legal Compliance)
Project CALC explores the application of computational law - the representation of legal rules in electronic form — within the field of building design and construction. CALC will examine the degree to which existing laws governing the domain of building design can modeled within computer systems and made to interact with systems currently used in the field. Existing building construction projects are covered by numerous laws and regulations, including local building codes, federal environmental rules, and accessibility laws such as the Americans With Disabilities Act. The project will examine whether computer systems can assist design professionals in knowing and complying with these rules. CALC will also explore legal theoretical problems related to the representation of laws in computer systems, and propose principles for selecting and creating such laws. CALC is a interdisciplinary effort involving researchers and research from the fields of law, computer science, and civil engineering.
For more information, please visit Project CALC.
Project leader: Harry Surden
The Hammurabi Project is an experiment in converting legal source material to the C# programming language. It's an open source library with two components: First, it contains functions that make it easier to model legal rules. These functions support temporal logic, reasoning with partial knowledge, and some ontological relations among legal entities. This core library lays the groundwork for the second part of the project, which is to see if a machine executable "parallel corpus" can be created. The idea is to grow a body of source code that mirrors the structure of U.S. federal and state legislation, regulation, and case law. Hammurabi is hosted at Github and is available under the MIT license.
Project leader: Michael Poulshock
LawGives
LawGives is devoted to integrating technology and law to increase access to justice. Currently, prospective pro bono clients are generally limited by geography and by the limited resources available to the organizations and clinics that assist them. Further, cases requiring specialized knowledge or that might be of significant precedential value may go unnoticed. Meanwhile, law students are limited by the availability of opportunities to develop practical experience and connect with legal communities working in their areas of interest.
LawGives explores ways in which secure communications technologies and elements of Web 2.0 (social) and Web 3.0 (semantics) can be leveraged to address these issues. Pro bono clients and the various organizations representing them will be able to bring their cases to the attention of pro bono organizations, law school clinics, law students and lawyers. In a secure environment, students and legal professionals will be able to engage more efficiently and effectively with each other and those in need.
For more information, please visit lawgives.org
Project leaders: Pieter Gunst, Tony Lai, Bradley K. Newman
GoodBank
Banks and banking operate a complex ecosystem of transaction types, subject to laws and regulations designed to promote their safety and soundness. Since 2008, global bank regulators have been challenged to monitor compliance, and design preemptive rules and financial ratios that signal a bank venturing into harm's way, a bank that ultimately will represent systemic risk, or join a tidal wave of banks at risk of failure. Banks have a recurring cycle of failure, consolidation and taxpayer bailout.
Historically, bank regulators and the banks themselves operate in part transparently, and in part secretly. Banks and their regulators fear a "run on the bank" if it were known that a particular bank was out of compliance with normal performance ratios. "Stress test results" are rarely made public, except to try to assure the public that the system and its bank members are safe and sound.
In the Information Age, the transparency available to operate and regulate banks is vastly more diverse and rich than the reports filed quarterly under federal regulations. So too, the transparency required of banks is a disorganized pattern of laws whose purposes were targeted, and thereby narrowed to the detriment of gaining full perspective, of seeing the healthy forest and the health of its trees.
Project leader: Bruce Cahan
ArbyX
ArbyX® relates to international arbitration, the alternative dispute resolution process between or among transnational parties using independent arbitrators rather than national courts. This growing field of legal practice has generated rising criticism given the anticompetitive impulses of those arbitrators already in the business, the lack of transparency of arbitration as a mechanism to resolve disputes, and the timeliness and cost-efficiency of these processes that, at least originally, were intended to be an efficient alternative to national courts. ArbyX® attempts to coordinate information among arbitral institutions to improve the possibilities of conflict checks, information disclosure and the understanding of decision-making philosophy and techniques of arbitrators.
Project leader: Sergio Puig
