Ask HN: A tldr legal docs as a service?
Reading 20-page legal docs/terms/policies can be intimidating. I found this https://tldrlegal.com/ which helps with tldr for software licenses. I think there's scope for building a service that could explain long legal docs in plain English.
This could be a good machine learning project. What challenges do you sense at the first glance? IANAL, are you? This sounds like something you'd need to plaster with a LOT of disclaimers, especially if you're straying away from standard t&c/tos documentation. Discreet industries have quite specific legal terminology (in my experience) and machine learning is probably better suited to weeding out mistakes in documents rather than interpreting the contents within them. It's the interpretation that earns the big money. The example you've given is useful - but useful to an audience with specific prior knowledge and an existing familiarity with the licence landscape. Expanding beyond this is probably going to be an exercise in unintended consequences. The idea has a lot of merit and would be truly disruptive it it could be achieved, but if lawyer jokes have taught us anything, there is no shortage of motivation to reduce the worlds reliance on lawyers, but nobody has yet come up with a good solution (to my knowledge). Reminds me of mathematics. Shortest solution is usually the best (many Pythagorean theorem proofs) but they take effort and time. Law is also formal languages using logics. "Law is also formal languages using logics"
In theory yes, but contracts are not math and even though the consequences of disputes are costly, there is enough subjectivity within legal language that arbitration and interpretation by third parities is often required. i.e., two parties can have differing opinions on the meaning of the language and there can be enough uncertainty that costly proceedings are justified. (I'm talking specifically about civil rather than criminal law, and excluding cases where an interpretation of evidence is required) There's tosdr.org for Terms of Service for popular services