On Sat, 27 Oct 2018, ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk wrote:
> On Sat, 2018-10-27 at 15:30 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> > On Sat, 27 Oct 2018, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> > > On another subject, since ATMunn's judgement brought it up, I've been
> > > thinking since our previous contract about what would happen if we put
> > > out a hashed contract, with one of the clauses being "the parties won't
> > > reveal the text of this contract", then claiming in public that it
> > > gives various powers etc.
> > >
> > > Worth testing?
>
> That would presumably be similar to the old UNDEAD contract.
>
> Presumably, you're still unwilling to reveal the details of what it
> entailed. If so, that would imply that it's still being treated as
> binding by its participants, so maybe it's once again a contract in the
> Agoran-legal sense. (This argument might break down, though, e.g.
> perhaps you'd keep it secret not because you had to, but because the
> sense of mystery surrounding it is more interesting than the fairly
> banal truth behind it.)
Sorta similar! Not quite though.
The UNDEAD contract doesn't do anything that outsiders needed to track
directly, such as whether the contract grants any act-on-behalf powers.
(I think I'm allowed to make general statements like that - I hope so!)
It governs members' actions and membership is secret, so when it came
out it was sorta like a game of werewolf (e.g. "which one of us is a
member? is that person doing those actions to support the UNDEAD
agenda"?) IIRC no-one with standing (i.e. no member) ever brought a
breach-of-contract case against another member.
So in that sense it tested whether the Courts of the time could compel
the revelation of a private agreement (which they couldn't), but didn't
test whether Rules-granted abilities that impacted a recordkeepor (like
act-on-behalf) required transparency to be effective.
