A Contract Law Approach for the Treatment of Smart Contracts’ ‘Bugs’

IF 0.2 Q4 LAW
E. Rizos
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article attempts to derive some principles concerning the legal treatment of bugs in smart contracts, namely errors in the smart contract code which may result to some unwanted or unexpected outcome at the execution of the contract. Before dealing with this main issue, the article concludes that despite the practical issues that arise concerning the application of traditional contract law rules and principles, these rules remain relevant, and that a smart contract is typically (but not necessarily) a mere tool for the performance of the contract and not a legal contract itself. Therefore, typically, bugs in smart contracts should be examined under the doctrines of the breach of contract and/or the unfair enrichment and not as reasons for any potential invalidity of the contract. Only in (rather unlikely cases) where a smart contract could be indeed perceived as the body of the legal contract itself, printing errors in the code or other expressional mistakes concerning the semantics of the code (albeit not its function) could be perceived as potential reasons for the invalidity of the contract, according to the relevant rules of each jurisdiction. Nevertheless, even in these cases, interpretation of the contract with objective standards should not be ruled out, even when the contract is concluded by means of artificial intelligence (AI). The article examines also contributory negligence issues.
处理智能合约“漏洞”的合同法方法
本文试图推导出一些关于智能合约漏洞的法律处理原则,即智能合约代码中的错误,这些错误可能会在合同执行过程中导致一些不必要或意外的结果。在处理这一主要问题之前,文章得出结论,尽管在适用传统合同法规则和原则方面出现了实际问题,但这些规则仍然具有相关性,智能合同通常(但不一定)只是履行合同的工具,而不是法律合同本身。因此,通常情况下,智能合约中的漏洞应根据违约和/或不当得利的理论进行审查,而不是作为合同潜在无效的理由。根据每个司法管辖区的相关规则,只有在智能合同确实可以被视为法律合同本身的主体的情况下(相当不可能的情况),代码中的印刷错误或与代码语义(尽管不是其功能)有关的其他表述错误才能被视为合同无效的潜在原因。然而,即使在这些情况下,也不应排除以客观标准解释合同的可能性,即使合同是通过人工智能订立的。这篇文章还探讨了共同过失问题。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
33.30%
发文量
25
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