On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 08:11:25PM -0600, Mac Norton wrote:
Of course not. Unilateral offers can be made to a defined class of persons and accepted by action thereon. An old principle, but valid still. MacN
On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Greg Broiles wrote:
It has been conventional wisdom that, for e-commerce to fulfill its potential, each party to a transaction must be confident in the identity of the others.
The quoted text isn't mine - but, to further expand on Mac's comments, it's not even necessary that the offeror's identity be clear to potential acceptors. It's quite likely that many people and organizations are wrong about the assumptions they make about identity - you may think you've bought fast-food from McTacoKing, but it turns you you purchased food from an out-of-state corporation that's a franchisee of another out-of-a-different-state corporation who licenses out their recipes and trademarks to different people. This ambiguity may go both directions - the local McTacoKing may purchase services (like, say, carpet cleaning, or drain cleaning) from yet another locally-held but distantly-registered corporation who's just a franchisee/licensee of widely-recognized trademarks in those fields. It's easy to be sloppy and say that transaction represents a contract between McTacoKing and DrainSuckers - but that's not true at all. It's rare for people to even bother asking about niceties like business form (corporation vs. LLC vs. partnership vs. whatever), much less actually bother to figure out whether what's represented is really true - nobody bothers to call the Secretary of State and ask if the business called "X, Inc." really is a corporation, really is registered, really does have officers, etc., until people start using the words "million" or "billion". Trillions of dollars in small transactions take place without any attention at all paid to identity, in a legally significant sense - people do pay attention to trademarks, but those have only a slight relationship to the legal entitites involved. Even moderately sized-organizations find it useful to divide their operations into a number of legal entities, which may have common owners or have parent/subsidiary relationships - but invariably they hide that complexity behind a nice shiny trademark, because it's just distracting for people to think that "barnesandnoble.com" isn't really the same company as the people who run the bookstore down the street - or that the UPS who ships the books that the online entity sells you isn't the same UPS who sells the online entity the insurance on the safe delivery of that package. It's distracting to think that the entity which places a taxicab company ad in the yellow pages (which have the same logo as the local phone company, but are actually a separate corporation) isn't paid for by the corporation which owns the taxi which drives customers around, which isn't the same as the person who's driving, and may not even be the same company as the one which holds the taxi medallion. And who wants to think about the (lack of) identity between different banks and insurance companies who operate under the same trademarks and in the same office space? If you've got a savings account in a Bank of America branch in California and a checking account in a Bank of America branch in Oregon and a mutual fund account in a Bank of America branch in Oregon, how many different entities have you opened accounts with? 1? Bzzt! 3, or at least that was true before Congress clobbered the Glass-Stegall Act last year. Does that bother the people who cheerfully issue domain names and X.509 certs to various of these different entities? Nope. Does it bother consumers? Nope. Nobody cares, just like nobody cares that individual identities are pretty fluid, too, given that one name can be reused across many different meat things, and a single meat thing may, perfectly legally, use a number of different identies. The relationship between meat-world entities (including their cousins, the entities created by registration with governments or by mutual agreement of participants) and text strings like "John Smith" or "Bill Clinton" or "Bank of America" is not one-to-one but many-to-many, and that's not going to change. The legal system is accustomed to this ambiguity, and deals with it as necessary. Efforts to "fix" this and force people or corporations to identify in some enforceable way the underlying legal entities involved in a transaction are doomed to failure. The flexibility inherent in the ambiguity is important to getting things done - it's not a bug, it's a feature. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com PO Box 897 Oakland CA 94604