Information Law Possum (discontinued)

My colleagues from the Young Christian Democrats of the Canton of St. Gallen have lost their party’s memory: Their web hosting provider has unwittingly deleted the whole content of their website, http://www.jcvp-sg.ch, including the history of the party and their regional sections over the past ten years. The provider believes that the content is irreparably deleted (how long does he keep his back-up tapes? …) and thus offered them compensation for the material and immaterial loss of data.

Luckily, there’s Google’s cache, and all information still seems to be there: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.jcvp-sg.ch&btnG=Search Hence, I recommended that my friends settle with their provider for natural restitution, i.e. him clicking through Google’s cache and restoring the web content.

As Jusletter reports, the Swiss federal government proposes to repeal 11% of the federal statutes and to purge another 8%. 31 federal laws and parliamentary resolutions might be gone soon, together with 168 regulations.

It’s nothing new that laws are information themselves, and that they are prone to all the problems that come under the heading of information quality. But the subject nevertheless raises interesting questions:

How did they find out that they don’t need a given provision any longer? Did they check the access statistics for the (excellent) corpus juris of the Confederation, the federal government’s most popular website as an official explained to me once? Did they e-mail the competent authorities and ask them to scan the laws relevant to their field of activity? And how do they make sure that no provision will be struck that is still needed?

How much did the whole ”deep scan” of the corpus cost, and how much money do they expect to save with this clean-up? If no-one uses a law any longer, its mere existence on paper and on servers does not seem to do much harm.

This might be worth some research, which I don’t have time to do, unfortunately. The regulatory problem being to find out whether a law is still “alive”, i.e. needed and complied with, reminds me of the difficulties doctors sometimes have when they have to decide whether a patient is deeply comatose or brain dead.

A man convicted of multiple murder sought permission to buy the flight simulating software “X-Plane”, arguing that he wanted to leave his prison cell at least virtually from time to time. The request was refused by the prison authority for reasons of security: Due to the high data capacity of DVDs, the effort to search the data carrier for secret messages would be disproportionate. In addition, the authority reasoned that the wish to escape to a virtual world — such as a flight simulator — has to give way to these considerations.

The Federal Supreme Court ruled that this decision is not unconstitutional. (Decision in German is here.)

As Jusletter reports, two attorneys from the French-speaking part of Switzerland have created an online divorce website, divorce.ch.

For a bit more than 30 dollars, users get access to a database containing information on all legal aspects of a divorce.

For about 800 dollars, couples may create their own divorce settlement and the paperwork necessary to demand a divorce by consent (one of the “modes” of divorce the Swiss Civil Code knows). The settlement is created automatically on the basis of a questionnaire that the spouses have to fill out.

For Switzerland, this service is a true innovation. But I wonder how the lawyers who offer their services handle their liability for the automatically-generated settlements. Here is what their terms of use say:

Nous déclinons en outre toute responsabilité quant à d’éventuels dommages susceptibles de survenir du fait de l’utilisation des pages du site divorce.ch, y compris par suite de téléchargement d’éventuels fichiers ou pour ce qui concerne la Convention de divorce ou la Requête en divorce.

I have doubts as to the validity of this waiver, but all depends on the legal qualification of the contract concluded by the couple and the website owners.  Especially the high price of the service and the fact that the website owners are attorneys would make a good case for saying that the contract involves more duties than just offering the online form and its processing “as is”.