Minutes Draft from the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Secretary (File id: @@2588)

["Dr. Laurence Leff" <D-Leff@wiu.edu>]

                                 Minutes
                 Meeting of September Fourteenth 2005 
The OASIS Legal XML Member Section e-Contracts Technical Committee

Present: Daniel Greenwood, Dave Marvits, Peter Meyer, Rolly Chambers

Meeting started at 18:17 New York City Time

There was a brief discussion of Intellectual Property issues for
the submission of the BNML 1.0 schema to the eContracts Technical
Committee.  It was generally agreed that as our Technical Committee
was covered by the "legacy intellectual property policy" and Elkera
is now an associate member of OASIS, then any "contribution" by that
company would be covered under this policy.

There was a motion by Daniel Greenwood and seconded by David Marvits:

We will proceed with the BNML 1.0 to the end of making this the 1.0 
econtracts Schema

This passed with only one no-vote.  
That no vote was on the grounds of procedure, timing,
and tone and NOT on the technical merits of the proposal.

Mr. Peter Meyer discussed the three examples of BNML markup of
contracts that he prepared.  These are the
  Elkera Software License
  the Design-Build agreement (this is referenced in the Benchmarks Contracts
    folder of the Documents of our TC's web page)
  www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/legalxml-econtracts/download.php
     2099/BenchmarkContractsCoverSheet.html
  an Elkera consultancy agreement

One member proposed that we look athe eBay user agreement as an additional
sample contract.  This is important as it is the basis of a contract
between buyers and sellers on eBay, and hence billions of dollars
of business.  This is an example of a master agreement that is the basis
for many subcontracts corresponding to exchanges of electronic commerce
information.  

Our TC realized this latter issue
was not within the current scope of our effort.

Our TC also discussed the recording information from the user interface
under which they pressed an "I Agree" button to assent to the contract.
For example, the United States government, Department of Justice,
requires that the terms of "assent" are recorded in the contract.

Thus, our TC will look into methods of recording the "assent" terms.
This includes the relationship between this and the "click through agreements"
which is a Use Case recorded in the appropriate folder of our TC's
web site document section.  There is a extant software project to
Source Forge for such software.  That group is currently doing additional
work on recording the assent to a clickthrough-agreement and prompt
input from this technical committee could potentially impact that
effort.

Our TC did also discuss if and how the user interface and recording of
the assent to a "clickthrough" agreement can be part of the scope
of our work.

Meeting adjourned at 19:15 New York City time.