Team Presentation
The very fast evolution of the technological landscape and the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the every day life of most citizens raise new challenges which cannot be tackled by a purely technological approach. The motivation for the LICIT action stems from the observation that, despite the ever growing intermingling of ICT and law in the deployment of new technologies, the links between the two research communities are still too scarce. The objective of LICIT is to contribute, in partnership with research groups in law, to the development of new approaches and methods for a better integration of legal and technical instruments.
Research themes
LICIT emphasizes the exploration of the relationships between law and ICT through the use of formal methods. Many application areas are potentially concerned by this line of action, including privacy protection, electronic contracts, software licenses, digital content protection, digital proofs or computer assisted legal tools. Among these topics, the two main research activities in the first phase of the LICIT action concern respectively privacy issues and software liability :
• Privacy and “Ambient Intelligence” (AI): while many applications of AI benefit to the individuals, these new techniques also present enormous challenges for privacy. Privacy is quite a complex issue though, and some essential features of AI seem to conflict with fundamental legal principles: for example invisible communications do not allow for the required “informed consent” which is a cornerstone of most privacy regulations. Our objectives on this topic are twofold: (1) on the methodological side: we study, in collaboration with lawyers, the potential limitations (and desirable evolutions) of existing legal frameworks with respect to the IA technology; (2) on the technical side: we emphasize the design of privacy policies that are amenable to both formalization and realistic implementations in the ambient world.
• Software liability: one of the reasons why formal methods and other techniques for improving software quality have not been widely adopted by industry is that industrial actors do not have enough economical incentives to adopt these techniques. So far, software providers have succeeded in limiting their legal liability for damages caused by their products. The increasing dependence of society on software may change the situation however. In addition, as observed by several authors, software quality and patterns of security frauds are directly related to legal liability patterns. But the precise definition of the expected functionalities of software products is quite a challenge, not to mention the use of such definition as a basis for a liability agreement. Taking up this challenge is precisely our objective. To achieve this goal, we plan to study liability issues both from the legal and the technical points of view with the aim to put forward methods (1) to define liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) to establish liability in case of incident.
Scientific leader
Daniel LE METAYER
+33 4 76 61 52 09
Prenom.Nom@inrialpes.fr
Secretary : +33 4 76 61 54 76
