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To be sure, ''trying'' to impose a toll gate can be a self-imposed stockade anyway (remember Betamax?) — but not always: for {{strike|Apple|vendors who dominate their markets}}, proprietary formats survive, even those which wilfully interpose friction (DVD region encoding!) and thrive. At ''all'' of our costs. ''Even the dominant vendors’''. | To be sure, ''trying'' to impose a toll gate can be a self-imposed stockade anyway (remember Betamax?) — but not always: for {{strike|Apple|vendors who dominate their markets}}, proprietary formats survive, even those which wilfully interpose friction (DVD region encoding!) and thrive. At ''all'' of our costs. ''Even the dominant vendors’''. | ||
===[[Emergent]] standardisation?=== | |||
But shouldn’t the unmediated forces of competition work so that common standards emerge by themselves? If not, ''why not''? What incentives are at play that prevent it? | But shouldn’t the unmediated forces of competition work so that common standards emerge by themselves? If not, ''why not''? What incentives are at play that prevent it? | ||
Where commerce has worked this way, helped by the enlightened unselfishness of people like Tim Berners-Lee<ref>The World Wide Internet.</ref> and Jimmy Wales<ref>WikiMedia.</ref> ''staggering'' things have come about. Where it has not — and we are bound to note legal practice as being such a place — everyone remains mired in complication, chaos, cost, delay and, above all, ''[[tedium]]''. ''Imagine if a contract were a universal API for all commerce''. This is what it ''should'' be: a contract ''is'' a transfer: it is a connection point between two nodes on a network. Why are we so far from the [[end-to-end principle]]? | Where commerce has worked this way, helped by the enlightened unselfishness of people like Tim Berners-Lee<ref>The World Wide Internet.</ref> and Jimmy Wales<ref>WikiMedia.</ref> ''staggering'' things have come about. Where it has not — and we are bound to note legal practice as being such a place — everyone remains mired in complication, chaos, cost, delay and, above all, ''[[tedium]]''. ''Imagine if a contract were a universal API for all commerce''. This is what it ''should'' be: a contract ''is'' a transfer: it is a connection point between two nodes on a network. Why are we so far from the [[end-to-end principle]]? | ||
You can put this down in good part to [[Antitrust|anticompetitive]] instincts: regulatory and [[Paradigm|sociological]] barriers to entry to the legal profession — the Law Society’s and the Bar Association’s very ''raison d’etre'' is to maintain the stance that legal practice is ineffable. [[ISDA]] claims intellectual property in what should be — surely ''is'' — a common public utility. | You can put this down in good part to [[Antitrust|anticompetitive]] instincts: regulatory and [[Paradigm|sociological]] barriers to entry to the legal profession — the Law Society’s and the Bar Association’s very ''raison d’etre'' is to maintain the stance that legal practice is ineffable. [[ISDA]] claims [[intellectual property]] in what should be — surely ''is'' — a common public utility. But it benefits no-one should extract [[rent]] from boilerplate — much less ''pay'' it. | ||
The information revolution has enabled our “drift to [[Complicated|complicatedness]]” — with that drift, a view has congealed in the collective that the resulting “legal technology” that we can now so easily generate somehow has intrinsic value — is proprietary, deserving of commercial protection. but is it not better to see good market-standard contractual terms as a common interface between market participants: a ''public utility'' that enables business to get done with minimal friction? Contract ''technology'' should not ''proprietary''; rather contracts — agreements ''made out of'' contract technology — may be ''confidential''. To confuse a contractual ''confidence'' with a proprietary right in [[intellectual property]] comprising the contract is to make a category error. | |||
This is our challenge: to overcome our ingrained instinct to regard the quotidian tools of our trade assomehow [[Secret sauce|special]]. For we do not add value | This is our challenge: to overcome our ingrained instinct to regard the quotidian tools of our trade assomehow [[Secret sauce|special]]. For we do not add value with our [[boilerplate]]. | ||
Set your loved ones free, [[legal eagle]]s: contributing to a common fund allows the wisdom of the crowd to winnow down and fitness-select the best terms for everyone: ''stop claiming false propriety over common public standards. | Set your loved ones free, [[legal eagle]]s: contributing to a common fund allows the wisdom of the crowd to winnow down and fitness-select the best terms for everyone: ''stop claiming false propriety over common public standards. | ||