Smart Contract

How Close Are Smart Contracts to Impacting Real-World Law?

April 18, 2016By admin

Over the last year, the concept of a “smart contract” has received renewed attention in legal and business circles.

Advancements in blockchain technology have led some to believe that smart contracts could soon offer alternatives to traditional commercial and financial agreements, with dire results for the legal and financial sectors.

While this enthusiasm may be premature, the legal profession nonetheless remains mostly unaware of this important emerging technology and the long-term implications for their profession.In this context, “smart contract” refers specifically to the use of computer code to articulate, verify and execute an agreement between parties. Whereas a typical contract is drafted using natural language, the terms of smart contracts are expressed in code, similar to a programming language like javascript or HTML.

Source: CoinDesk

Barclays’ Smart Contract Templates heralds first ever public demo of R3’s Corda platform

April 18, 2016By admin

The Smart Contract Templates application developed by Barclays has heralded the first ever public demonstration of the R3 Corda “fabric” for shared banking ledgers, which took place before an audience of over 800 people at The O2 in London.

The event was the public demo day of the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, where 11 teams presented, including 10 startups and a Barclays internal team. The team behind the prototype smart contracts application was the internal one headed up by Dr Lee Braine from Barclays Investment Bank’s CTO Office.

Source: IBT

RightsTech Extra

AI Companies Get the Picture

By Paul Sweeting

One of the biggest challenges facing copyright owners in grappling with the rapid development of generative AI technology, apart from a murky legal status, has been market failure, as discussed here in previous posts. The amount of existing material needed to train gen-AI models is so great, and so varied, that gauging the value of any one piece of it to establish a market price for it for licensing purposes is often effectively impossible. One group of rights owners is finding willing buyers among AI companies, however. An active, albeit for various reasons mostly sotto voce market has begun to emerge for the use of images held in large photo archives and by photo agencies and social media platforms, complete with per-unit industry and at least a nod toward creator attribution... Read More >>