Control in a preliminary contract: the problem of fixing and implementing the right

Control within the framework of the preliminary contract is aimed at preventive identification of possible obstacles to the proper performance of the obligations assumed by the counterparty to the conclusion of the main transaction. Verification provides (inter alia) information certainty of commodity circulation participants, allowing minimizing the risks of non-performance or improper performance of future obligations. It is proposed, applying the law analogy, to provide a regulatory rule giving the party to the preliminary contract an opportunity to refuse to perform the contract in case of establishing (by the results of the control) that the obligation to conclude the main contract will not be performed by the counterparty within the time-frame. It seems that this rule will have a regulatory function, encouraging the parties to the preliminary contract to organize proper control so that, on the one hand, to ensure the proper exchange of information, on the other hand – to prevent unwarranted interference in the economic activities of the counterparty. In this case, the unreasonable refusal of a party to a preliminary contract to provide the counterparty with an opportunity to exercise control (to provide the necessary information, property for inspection) should be regarded as a lack of interest or even intentional obstruction of the preliminary contract purpose achievement. The recognition of such dishonest behavior of a person as evasion from entering into a basic civil-law relation allows us to talk about the possibility of application of operative measures of influence by a competent subject.

Open Networks and Closed Circuits

Both nation-states and intellectual property owners have sought to impose interdiction obligations on network intermediaries. This chapter considers the extent to which such efforts have begun to coalesce into more definite patterns. Narratives about the dangers of uncontrolled information flow, including threats to public safety, threats to information property, and threats to state authority, have morphed into expansionist accounts of existential threat that are thought to justify correspondingly broad countermeasures. Meanwhile, powerful new platform intermediaries have resisted the imposition of formal interdiction mandates, seeking arrangements that better serve their own interests. In some contexts, struggles among competing authorities have produced institutional settlements that involve strong legal mandates; in others, platform-based, algorithmically mediated “self-regulation” has emerged as the path of least resistance. Meanwhile, logics of fiat interdiction have become progressively normalized within legal and policy discourses.

Logic on MARS: Ontologies for Generalised Property Graphs

Graph-structured data is used to represent large information collections, called knowledge graphs, in many applications. Their exact format may vary, but they often share the concept that edges can be annotated with additional information, such as validity time or provenance information. Property Graph is a popular graph database format that also provides this feature. We give a formalisation of a generalised notion of Property Graphs, called multi-attributed relational structures (MARS), and introduce a matching knowledge representation formalism, multi-attributed predicate logic (MAPL). We analyse the expressive power of MAPL and suggest a simpler, rule-based fragment of MAPL that can be used for ontological reasoning on Property Graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to making Property Graphs and related data structures accessible to symbolic AI.