I submit the following evidence on CFJ 2277, so I can reference it in my
judgement:
{{{
This is from my own private ##nomic logs, and covers some of the
conversation in ##nomic immediately before the evidence presented in
this case so far (with a few lines of overlap shown):
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> So, in Agora, I am now obligated to
ascend in the next 30 days.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <Pavitra> Good luck.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> And by ascend, I mean win a game of
NetHack on NAO.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> Pledge time.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] Join flojistik has joined this channel
([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <Sgeo> ihope, why do you keep making these
pledges?
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> I didn't make a pledge this time.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> That was an equity judgement.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <Sgeo> What?
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> An equity judgement requires me to
ascend in the next 30 days.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <Sgeo> That doesn't start for a week, does it?
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> Oh, that's likely.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> I agree to the following: {This is a
pledge. The Bell of Opening, the Candelabrum of Invocation, the Book of the
Dead, and the Amulet of Yendor are singleton assets, known as Artifacts.
Ownership of Artifacts is restricted to active players. On Agora's Birthday, if
the Speaker is the same person as e was on Agora's last Birthday, e can once
transfer one of the Artifacts to emself; this Artifact cannot be the Amulet of
Yendor unless e posses
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> Oops, I didn't mean to agree to that.
[Wed Oct 15 2008] [14:47:59] <ihope> Therefore, it's not really a pledge.
I can't remember offhand whether the timestamps are UTC or local time,
but that isn't relevant here.
}}}
I submit the following arguments and judgement for CFJ 2227:
Looking at the caller's evidence, it is clear that no pledge has been
made here. The main issue here appears to be whether someone can
accidentally say something pledge-like on a random forum and have it
turned into an Agoran pledge, but there are several other things wrong
which makes that point moot:
* Probably most importantly, there is no closing } of the
purported pledge. As a result, the full text of the pledge was
presumably never communicated in ##nomic; it would certainly be
unreasonable to believe that everything said in that channel (or
even everything said by Warrigal, I like the new name btw)
constituted a pledge. (Incidentally, I've just said } in ##nomic
just in case.)
* Also, the preamble was "I agree to the following:". Although
from context the pledge seems likely to have been an Agoran one,
##nomic has no particular association with Agora in particular
(B Nomic, Canada (which is currently dead), and PerlNomic are
also discussed there from time to time (Normish has its own
channel)); although it is not possible to form a pledge with
that wording in any of those three nomics at present, this is
clearly just an accident of history, and nothing about the
purported pledge identified itself as Agoran other than the
wording used. I don't think that this is sufficiently
unambiguous to constitute the creation of an Agoran contract.
* Looking at the text of the purported contract, "Oops, I didn't
mean to agree to that." appears to be inside the contract itself
(probably because part of it got cut off), which arguably would
cause the contract to have no legal force.
* Finally, the main point of the case: posting a proto of a
contract privately for discussion does not cause someone to
agree to it. ##nomic is not currently an Agoran forum (although
I have a current intention to change it to a DF). I can imagine
a set of Scamsters privately circulating the text of a message
that they intended to send to a PF at some point, and as long as
there was an understanding in advance that everything in that
message was not intended to be valid /yet/ it wouldn't matter.
However, this argument does not necessarily apply; it depends on
context as to whether the intention was to create a pledge, or
to merely talk about the creation of a pledge. I have submitted
the context in question as evidence in this case, and it doesn't
give a clear indication either way; my immediate conclusion from
reading it was that Warrigal intended to create a pledge to scam
them out of the equation of CFJ 2119, in which case the pledge
would presumably be valid, although if it were part of a scam
Warrigal would presumably have sent it to a-b, as scams tend to
be very careful except in the parts that they are testing.
(Given Warrigal's track record, though, I can't be sure.) On the
other hand, the chance that Warrigal was just messing around is
also quite high, again given eir track record. I think on
balance I'd probably rule that a pledge would have been created
("Pledge time." to me indicates an intent to create a pledge
soon), were it not for the other problems, but that it's quite
subjective and context-based whether a contract is in general
created or not when someone attempts to do something that
resembles agreeing to a contract, and must be taken on a
case-by-case basis. The forum, the wording, and the
understanding (or lack thereof) between the people involved in
sending and receiving the messages are all important. In this
case, pledges have been made in ##nomic before, and there was no
indication at the time the pledge was purportedly made that it
was not meant to be an agreement to a contract; also, there is
no evidence that the other people in that channel were talking
about the protoing of contracts or another similar situation in
which the text starting "I agree" might have been considered to
be mentioned rather than used. (Contrast "I agree to the
following" with "Contrast 'I agree to the following' with ...").
On IRC, as opposed to email, it is hard to tell the difference
between a quotation and a sentence that's meant to do something
(and incidentally, this sort of thing created a major row at
Canada once), but in this case it looked like it was an
action-statement, and there was no clear evidence otherwise.
* One final issue is about whether Warrigal's statements
immediately presumably-after the presumed pledge constituted a
disclaimer that prevented it being created. I suspect probably
they do, because there was very little time involved in between
the messages. For email messages, sending a message and then
disclaimering it in a future message would obviously not be
valid, as convention is that the entire content of an email
message is in one email. On IRC, however, there is a convention
that messages can be split over multiple lines. For instance,
#ubuntu at high-traffic times sometimes has a rule that messages
have to be written in one line for pragmatic reasons (during
high-traffic, the parts of the message may end up very separated
and hard to read otherwise); for email, this rule would be
pointless, because nobody splits up messages anyway. Due to a
multiple-lines convention, it seems reasonable that a purported
contract and the disclaimer that it's only a proto ("Oops, I
didn't mean to agree to that.") are really part of the same
message in this case, especially as there were no intervening
lines and a very short timeframe. (As such, it's also plausible
to conclude that no contract is created via IRC until a few
seconds after the message arrives, so as to be sure that the
message itself is actually finished; the same presumably applied
to game actions in #really-a-cow, but I don't believe anything
happened for which this would make a difference.)
Although in general it is possible to create a contract like that over
IRC, in the case of this CFJ it failed for several reasons: the message
was ambiguous and incomplete, and it was effectively disclaimered.
Therefore, I rule CFJ 2227 FALSE.
--
ais523
Judge, CFJ 2227
