Information Letter “On the Issue of Legal Wrongfulness in Establishing Witness Credibility through Forensic Evaluation”

This information letter was produced in response to a growing number of inquiries from investigators, and increased instances of forensic psychologists being appointed to evaluate witness credibility based on videos of interrogations. The letter addresses the need to streamline forensic casework related to the analysis of video recordings of specific investigative actions involving different agents of the criminal process. The letter considers possibilities for commissioning these forensic procedures and the rationale for conducting such examinations, in compliance with the scientific principles of professional forensic work.

Thinking Ahead

This chapter presages into the future scope of growth along different dimensions of the current forensic technologies for software copyright infringement investigation. Firstly, it explains how induction of additional software elements in the forensic processes and procedures can make the forensic efforts more reliable. Secondly, it suggests that there should be more initiatives from the software community to find ways to automate most, if not all, of the subjective decisions in these procedures in a legally convincing way. Thirdly, it encourages software forensic researchers to formulate copyright infringement forensic methods that have the lowest error rating. Fourthly, it previews the possibility of the existing software authorship identification methods to emerge in the future as tests to establish copyright infringement. The focus then shifts to the issues involved in customization of (global) software forensic procedures in tune with the (local) copyright laws. The chapter argues that there is scope for further judicial intelligence on deciding what all software elements are protectable and what all are unprotectable. It concludes stressing the need for extensive forensic education for the judiciary and also the pragmatics of bilingual and multilingual discourses between the forensic and the judicial communities.