[GRAAP-WG] Modification to the wiki Page on Renegotiating an established Agreement

[Michael Parkin]

Hi Omer,

Thanks for your reply.

On 24 Aug 2007, at 10:53, Omer F Rana wrote:

> My undersstanding of the Mobach et al. paper -- and  the reason the  
> 2PC
> approach was chosen was to satisfy legal constraints that they were  
> working on.
> Their aim was more to ensure that legally both parties were  
> covered, more than
> looking into the specifics of constraints of a distributed  
> implementation.

I believe that the legal, distributed computing _and_ business  
aspects of agreement must be considered together to design a  
successful contract negotiation and formation protocol - they cannot  
be considered separately. When all three aspects are taken into  
account together it is clear that 2PC-type protocols are  
inappropriate for cross-administrative domain negotiation because of  
the risk of blocking that is introduced, as I described in my  
previous email.

Work we have done [1] together with the School of Law at Manchester  
University investigates maintaining the legalities of contract  
negotiation and formation (including adhering to the EU's e-Commerce  
directive) whilst still allowing the entity supplying the resources/ 
services not to be blocked, thus satisfying the requirements of  
business. Section 4.1 of the linked paper discusses blocking.

Dean Kuo (who many of you know...[2]) and I are writing up and  
formally specifying the protocol we derived from this work and will  
be submitting this work for publication soon.

Michael.

[1] http://www2.cs.man.ac.uk/~parkinm/publications/ 
eChallenges_e2006_ref_235.pdf
[2] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~dkuo/