On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Alex Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 09:35 -0500, Geoffrey Spear wrote:
>> I CFJ on the following: "Contracts CAN be amended by a mechanism other
>> than unanimous consent of all parties."
>>
>> Argument: The ruling in CFJ 2246 strongly implies that any amendment
>> process other than unanimous consent violates R101.
>
> Argument: Other amendment processes don't necessarily 'violate' it in
> the sense of making it not counting as having agreed to the amendment
> either; for instance, without-objection, or without member objection, or
> any method that gives people a chance to leave the contract before it's
> resolved. I think pretty much all popular contracts at the moment have
> such an agreement-safe mechanism.
Gratuitous: When the "rights" clauses of R101 were written, there
was wording in the Rules that the Rules themselves should be "treated
as" a contract. This was since removed and/or broken, but at
the time there was the following passage (R1503/6):
The proposal, fora, and registration processes shall, prima
facie, be considered to be protective of a Player's rights and
privileges with respect to making and changing the agreement to
be bound by the rules.
This strongly suggests that a Proposal-type process, though non-
unanimous, was seen as reasonable model for constituting "reasonable
opportunity to review" an amendment to a contract. While that direct
link between contracts and Rules is no more, the wording of that
right has not substantially changed nor have those standards been
strongly challenged by precedent to my knowledge, strongly suggesting
that contracts containing non-unanimous processes with adequate
distribution and decision-time requirements would not violate R101
rights.
[n.b. I haven't fully digested CFJ 2246 so don't have a specific
opinion there as of yet].
-Goethe
