The authors examine technologies that support business processes, and the interaction of these technologies with systems of law. The text starts with a discussion of Internet technologies and then moves to a discussion of agent technologies. An e-business, agent-based research scenario and methodology are presented, and applied, to support the assertion that almost all online business activities and e-commerce technologies and models are illegal.
Four chapters present the legal issues (problems) raised by agent processing in four areas: contracts, intellectual property rights (IPR), consumer protection, and privacy. This is done mostly within the European legal framework (where the greatest attempts have been made to introduce legislation and other regulation). Problems and illegalities are identified, listed, and analyzed in each chapter. The point is made that the failure of the legal framework to address what is now commonplace in digital transactions is incomprehensible.
The thesis of the book is that the current approach to building and implementing e-commerce applications leads to illegality in several ways: the law does not match technological processes and innovations, technological development does not respect legal requirements, and the current methodology is based on retrofitting (both law and technology are retrofitted to fit and adapt to each other). After establishing this thesis, a solution to the law-technology mismatch is presented. This consists of a dual approach comprised of a new form of law to adapt the legal framework to the technology, and a new software engineering methodology and components (environment) to adapt technology to the law, at design time. Thus, system designers are seen as building compliant e-commerce applications.
The book makes initial technology and design recommendations. One recommendation calls for the design of a consumer-oriented legal framework. Another is a collection of consumer-oriented technical proposals. These proposals address consumer advertising, consumer contracting, and consumer information, including the recording of a transaction.
The design process should incorporate business modeling, which is asserted to be a methodology that is not well defined and in need of research. The book calls for models that enable relationships and processes to be automated in a manner that closely resembles natural workflow. To aid in this, the MIT “View of the Firm” is introduced. This consists of a previously unpublished diagram that resulted from joint work by Brian Subirana and another researcher (Thomas Malone) at the MIT Center for Coordination Science.
A legal-process model or new architecture based on new insights (the research of the book and similar research) is called for. The new legal models and architecture should capture public and private norms, and yield a new type of law, removing all illegalities.
The software engineering methodology is proposed to include agents and multi-agent architectures. This includes agent programming, agent-commerce modes, and multi-agent systems, to be derived using the MIT “View of the Firm.” The software engineering model should, in addition to agents, incorporate Web-service models and a semantic Web. Web services are considered to be Web sites and other applications, linked to the network not just to provide information, but to allow interlocutors to cause some kind of process to be carried out (for example, the sale of a product or control of a physical device). A semantic Web is a logical extension of a network of machine-intelligible documents, and is itself a network that encodes knowledge using a structured, logically connected representation, and determines inference rules that can be used to conduct automatic reasoning.
The book is thought provoking. For example, I was led to consider other systems that are strongly influenced by technology, and yet operate predominantly outside the law. One such group of systems is that of military systems throughout the world. These systems operate at their will, with the main means of regulation being the richest, most powerful, and most enterprising military systems. So far, it seems a similar situation exists in the e-commerce and mobile commerce (m-commerce) world. The book calls for a change to this scenario, via research to have e-commerce and m-commerce operate within a regulated legal system. Time will tell whether a situation different from military systems can be realized for e-commerce and m-commerce. Perhaps the research called for in this book will show the way.
The book contains a very limited index. A glossary would have been helpful. There is an extensive bibliography, and footnotes are included for many concepts and issues. A video compact disc (CD) is also provided, introducing a customer-personalized shopping assistant for use in supermarkets called “Grocer.”
