[Specs-cx] General Concept of Contract Exchange and Contract Schema

[Nat Sakimura]

Hi Diana,

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Diana Almeida
<diana.r.almeida at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello Nat and all the others,
>
> My comments (and some questions) inline.
>
>
> Nat Sakimura escreveu:
>
>>
>> The main aim of Contract Exchange is to define a way to exchange the
>> "(possibly) Legally Binding Contract" between parties.
>>
>
> You don't talk about a third party. Generally speaking when two parties are
> doing a transation there has to be a third party on which they both trust.
> Are we going to talk about this?


Well, current draft (which I hope to send you by the end of this week) is
based on X.509 Certificates, which means the CAs infrastructure acts as the
Trusted Third Party.

If we were to use generic public key - private key pair (e.g., generic DSA),
then this "trust" issue has to be dealt with separately. Having said that,
to get the first version out rather quickly (instead of 3 years working),
the proposers made the decision to make this trust mechanism out of scope of
this working group. In other word, the trust part can be profiled
separately.


>
>
>
>> Thus, defining what should be in that Contract Document is one of the main
>> task of this WG.
>>
>> The other task is to define a protocol that enables parties to achieve the
>> creation and exchange of such contract documents.
>>
>> From my experiecne, a contract generally has the following in it.
>>
>> Contract ID (uri)
>> Party A (uri)
>> Party B (uri)
>> Signatory of Party A (text)
>> Signatory of Party B (text)
>> Contact Address of Party A (text or uri?)
>> Contact Address of Party B (text or uri?)
>> Main Content of this Contract
>> - What is to be provided (text)
>> - What is received in return (text)
>> Term and Termination
>> - Term / Validity Period of the Contract (Datetime-Datetime)
>> - Termination (text)
>> - Survival of Certain Terms (text)
>> Damages
>> - Explanation (text)
>> - max amount from A to B (number?)
>> - max amount from B to A (number?)
>> Non Disclosure
>> - How to specify (text)
>> - How Long (datetime-datetime)
>> Relationship to other Contracts (text)
>> Signature of the Signatory of Party A (text)
>> Date of the Signature A (datetime)
>> Signature of the Signatory of Party B (text)
>> Date of the Signature B (datetime)
>>
>> Is this generally good or are there anything that are necessary in
>> addition to these?
>>
>
>
> I believe this is generally good. I can't remember anything else that
> should be included in the contract.
>
>
>> Should we specify the schema for these or should we keep it to bare
>> minimal and let everything else be represented as text?
>> Should we try to incorporate LegalXML etc.
>>
>> These are the kind of questions that I have in mind for the "Contract as a
>> document" portion.
>>
>> Fortunately, we have Scott Blackmer in this WG who is a knowledgeable
>> lawyer, so Scott could cast some insight on this issue.
>>
>> Then, there will be the protocol for exchanging this along with some
>> technical requirement such as inclusion of the public key of the parties.
>> I will touch on these on a separate post.
>>
>
> Sorry, just a quick question regarding the validation of the signatures.
> Can't we think about public key as an OpenID attribute? Wouldn't this
> simplify the process of validating the signature?


We need to separate out two kind of signatures: Signatures for the message
integrity check (i.e, transient) and signature for the document (i.e., to
store.) Here, we are taking about the later. Signature can be sent as an
OpenID attribute, but we have to also specify how it should be stored.



>
>
>
>
> My best,
> Diana
>
>
>> Please discuss.
>>
>> --
>> Nat Sakimura (=nat)
>> http://www.sakimura.org/en/
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>>
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>
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-- 
Nat Sakimura (=nat)
http://www.sakimura.org/en/
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