[Ecommerce] J. Gregory compilation of comments & answers regarding UNCITRAL E-Contract Projet for ABA Meeting next week

[Manon Anne Ress]

Dear Colleagues,

Policy and legal issues raised by the proposed UNCITRAL convention on
electronic contracts will be o the table at the ABA Business Law 
Section's Spring meeting Los Angeles April 4, 2003.

John D. Gregory has sent a document that includes draft recommendations 
on each of the major issues, and comments about those recommendations.

Some of the compiled questions include:
Why prepare a convention on e-contract formation?
Should it be limited (to only international transactions) or apply to 
all e-contracts?
Should an e-contract convention exclude consumer transactions? and if 
yes, how?
Should it exclude contracts purporting to give limited use of 
intellectual property rights and maybe exclude rights in data too?
Should exclusions focus on types of goods, types of transaction or types 
of party, or all of these where appropriate? (e.g. financial services or 
transactions by financial institutions)?
There are also many questions on Article 12 that deals with automated 
transactions. The first paragraph makes contracts involving an automated 
program on one side or both sides acceptable in law, even without human 
review. The language is very much like that of UETA on the same point 
(UETA s. 14) etc...

He writes: "these recommendations have no official status whatever. They 
are points inserted by me to focus readers' attentions on the issues 
more clearly. They will be discussed at the ABA Business Law Section's 
meeting in early April, and that group may choose to adopt or to change 
the recommendations for its own purposes. If anyone wishes to comment 
privately, they can reply to John Gregory or to the list 
(eglobal-list@rh.edu)."

The ABA issues paper responses March 27 (comments and questions compiled 
by John D. Gregory is available top of our UNCITRAL Ecommerce Work page 
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/uncitral/

Have a good weekend.

Manon

-- 
Manon Anne Ress
Consumer Project on Technology
www.cptech.org
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176