meta-roj

i haven’t done a “business model of the hour” for some time now, but with the directv, riaa and red-light ticket camera examples to build on, there’s an obvious successor to explore.

the premise that supports this business is that the law has become so unweildy and complicated, with so many fine points of violation, that all of us violate some law, contract, terms-of-use agreement, acceptable use policy, tax code, or something all the time, usually without realizing it. with hundreds of millions of americans (and why stop at americans?) violating tens of thousands of legal terms every day, there is a vast opportunity to commercialize law and contract enforcement.

red-light cameras are a great starting point. the law is the law. running a red light is a bad thing. it’s an illegal thing. companies sprung up to monetize the crime – the fines are set by the legislators, but a good chunk of those fines are kept as a sort of bounty by the company operating the camera. everyone wins. the law is enforced, the public is safer, the government gets new revenue, and the operating company gets piles of cash. who can argue with that kind of success?

the approach is spreading, so it’s critical to move on this quickly. why should the riaa have to track down and sue its own customers? why should directv have to track down people who buy smartcard programming gear?

start a company that does thorough economic analysis of every fine point of every law and contract ever written. cherry-pick the most monetizable ones – the ones with the most potential violators – and pursue them with all the resources available on a purely contingent, bounty-like basis. to get started, use the dmca subpoena provisions to slap together copyright-violator hit-lists and score fast revenue.

the plan is to hire hundreds – no, thousands – of new, fresh lawyers and form them into “industry strike teams.” these teams will pick industries and industrial segments where a number of average citizens are violating some legal or contractual provision, create a mailing list with tens or hundreds of thousands of potential violators, and send threatening letters. offer an amnesty in exchange for a check and a signature promising to never, ever do whatever it was again.

and that opens up a second revenue stream – data-mining to ensure compliance with all those new promises.

there are a lot of smart people in law school these days, and they are all going to need jobs….what’s wrong with helping out a few poor, needy, debt-ridden lawyers at the expense of everyone?

i guess this company would need a good number of really good spin doctors too. and probably a bomb-proof headquarters.