your favorite protocols

Greg Broiles gbroiles at netbox.com
Sat Dec 30 10:56:08 PST 2000


On Sat, Dec 30, 2000 at 04:28:24AM -0500, dmolnar wrote:
> I agree with you that the term is stretched a bit thin. Still, there seem
> to be at least two major things which fall under it in the work I've seen
> 
> 	1) "Digital Rights Management" - which you mentioned below
> 	2) Contract languages like E (www.erights.org) and 
> 	the Haskell combinator library discussed in
>  
> Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Ebert, and Julian Seward in ICFP 2000 
> ``Composing Contracts: an Adventure in Financial Engineering.''
> http://riss.keris.or.kr:8080/pubs/articles/proceedings/fp/351240/p280-jones/p280-jones.pdf
> (thanks to Norman Ramsey for the reference)

Thanks for the reference - I'll look at it over the weekend. 

> Even so, it seems to me that their techniques will have wider application.
> Suppose Alice wants to selectively reveal parts of her contact with Bob to
> Carol -- maybe she wants to convince Carol that Bob didn't give Alice a
> better price than Bob did to Carol in order to win Carol's goodwill. 

I have a hard time imagining this being useful in real life - I'm
not interested in seeing only part of a contract, because I've got no 
idea what the rest of the contract says. The fact that there's language
on one page which appears to set particular terms doesn't mean that the
language is operative - perhaps it was prefaced with conditions which
aren't presently applicable, or are now but won't be in the future. Or
perhaps the contract has expired, or is void, or is voidable, or has
been breached, or terminated. 

This seems pretty much exactly comparable to showing a programmer parts
of a computer program and asking them to reach a conclusion about the
behavior or correctness of the entire program, including the omitted or
obscured parts. 

I can't imagine any sensible person who would act on a contract shown
to them by someone else if the someone else refused to show them the
entire document - but that's what's proposed in the scheme described in
the Durfee and Franklin paper. They do discuss being able to prove
(instead of guarantee) that certain terms of the license (which they
insist on calling a contract) are within the boundaries of a 
pre-existing master "contract", which is a good beginning, but they're
avoiding a lot of the hard work by assuming that every important term
can be represented as a single value, and ignoring the interrelationships
between terms or values.

For example, "This license is terminable on 30 days' notice at licensor's
option if the royalties paid in any calendar year are less than $10,000.00
USD." isn't an uncommon term in a license agreement - how is a sublicensor
to prove to a prospective sublicensee that the license hasn't been 
terminated? They'd need to prove a negative - nonreciept of the notice of
termination - which is notoriously difficult. 

(The middleman could produce proof tending to show that they had not
breached, leading to the inference that notice, if given, would have
been inappropriate - but that's not the same result.) 

> The techniques in the paper seem to  allow Alice to do that without having
> to reveal exactly what her price from Bob was (or learn what Carol's price
> was, for that matter) -- and have it backed up by a contact signed by Bob. 
> 
> Then again, I don't know how often these kinds of situations come up in
> real life...or will come up in the future. 

My hunch is that it won't - I do still think it's a neat trick, but it 
sounds a lot like a solution searching for an applicable problem, instead
of the other way around. 

> Where would I go to learn about the difference between contracts and
> licenses so as to understand what you mean here? (Besides law school;
> that's still an option for me, but not now). Because I'd like to avoid
> contributing to this problem if that's possible...

If you are in the mood to read, "Understanding Copyright Law" by Marshall
Leaffer is about $30 and hopefully accessible; my favorite reference for
contract law is Farnsworth's "Contracts" hornbook, though I fear it may
not be as friendly to people who don't have a compelling reason to make
their way through it. 

I am having a hard time thinking of a good way to learn what the books
don't explain, which is how to figure out which body of law is applicable
to a given problem. I am only getting better at that some 5 years out
of law school, and it's not even something where experts agree.

Questions about how to organize transactions to minimize the incidence
and consequences of failure are very old questions, and legal and 
insurance people have evolved some pretty detailed approaches to
solving common (and uncommon) problems - it's something of a waste of 
time for people to start working on those problems without learning
about what's been tried in the past. That certainly doesn't mean
that what's done now is perfect, or efficient - but in many cases it's
been shaped by tens or hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years of 
experience and testing, which does have some value. 

Mostly I think it's unfortunate that relatively common words like
"signature" or "contract" get reused - initially it's not a big 
problem, because the people close to the theoretical work understand
the gulf between their models and the real world - but 5 or 10 years
out, we end up with questions like "are digital signatures really
signatures" or "is a smart contract a contract" or "do you mean you
signed it with a pen, or with your browser?". I guess this is the
same process that called cars "horseless carriages" for awhile -
people who think of new technologies name them after older things
which serve many of the same goals, leading to confusion. 

That doesn't seem so terrible, but I do think that the "smart contracts"
trend ignores the real role of contracts, which is their social role -
which is that they're agreements which society will force people to
fulfill, not agreements enforced by technology. Both the DRM and the
E-rights technologies assume that there can be no meaningful external
review of the agrements or the actions of the parties to an agreement,
and proceed to limit people's behavior accordingly.

That may be a reasonable assumption to make - but it is not law, at
least in the way that people talk about "the rule of law". It does
limit human behavior - which is the purpose of law - but it does it
in a different way (the same way that fences or handcuffs do).
Larry Lessig's book "Code" talks a lot about how technology can create
its own limits for human action, though I think it's unfortunate
that he calls it "law". 

In any event, it's confusing to a lot of people to mix those two
approaches to governing human conduct (or human conduct as expressed
through machines) - one consists of verbal expressions which are
interpreted by human beings (where that interpretive process may be
recursive), another consists of physical things which need or permit
no interpretation (though they may contain Turing machines). 

My own interests and biases lean towards the former model (though 
I am not such a purist that I refuse to employ locks or guns if
necessary), but the second model is also certainly legitimate. My
real beef is with people who accidentally or deliberately confuse
the two models, because that leads to unproductive thinking and
behavior. 

--
Greg Broiles gbroiles at netbox.com
PO Box 897
Oakland CA 94604





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