Get Creative. Skip the intermediaries. So says Creative Commons, which aims at making a digital rights language that is lawyer-readable, human-readable and computer-readable. No small challenge – two of the three is enough of a challenge in my experience.
Back in 1997, when I started working for the Swedish government, one of my first projects was to help create a new legal information system, for lawyers, humans (citizens) and machines. When we in 1998 published a green paper about the system, we laid the foundation for what has become Lagrummet. The project was never able to please both lawyers, humans and machines, and still isn’t. Critics, of which we had many, would say it pleases neither. Of course, the original idea – basing it all on XML – is still just a dream, and far from practice. We were on to it early on, at the time when neither lawyers, humans nor machines knew what XML is. Some of these groups have caught up since then, of course.
Ah, word of the day: cobloggaration.
