Re: Security - question about nonrepudiation

[bhaugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

This is a fascinating discussion; I'll only comment on one minor issue.

>      isLegallyBinding (BusinessTransactionActivity attribute) -
>           the business transaction is/is not legally binding
>
> MWS:  There was a lot of discussion of isLegallyBinding on the listservers
> a few weeks ago.  I believe that the position of the BP team is that
> isLegallyBinding is simply a test vs production indicator and not some
kind
> of legal status issue for the CPA + BPSS instance as a whole.

The 'isLegallyBinding' parameter came out of a workshop on contract
negotiation
which resulted in the Ecommerce Patterns technical report on the ebXML.org
web site.

In contract negotiation, it is often useful to pass trial contract documents
around
until they reach an acceptable state.  In the paper world, the real
contracts would
be differentiated from the trial ones because the real ones would be signed.

We determined that digital signatures could not be used in the same way as
paper
signatures (to differentiate trial contracts from real ones) because digsigs
have
many other purposes, e.g. authentication, and may want to be used for trial
documents, too.  Thus the 'isLegallyBinding' flag.

It is also useful for test vs production, and probably other situations when
trading
partners want to transmit documents for info purposes that they do not want
to
have any binding effect.

Jamie Clark lurks on this list too, so he may correct me if I messed
anything up,
but I was there when this stuff was decided.

-Bob Haugen