Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting of the IETF

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At Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:22:31 -0500,
Pete Resnick wrote:
> On 9/22/09 at 2:50 PM -0400, Ray Pelletier wrote:
> 
> >The language in the contract is a statement of the law and is 
> >intended to put the Host and group on notice of such. If the 
> >language were not in the contract, it would still be the law.
> 
> Certainly the part about "defamation", "show any disrespect", and 
> "violates any laws" (which, according to Marshall's original message, 
> includes certain politicial statements and protest marches) are 
> clearly a statement of the law as others have explained in this 
> thread. I've heard nothing so far that indicates that the rest of the 
> clause (with regard to terminating the event or the hotel or host 
> having responsibility for the enforcement) is any part of the law.

This is exactly right.

Reasoning by analogy is always dangerous, but let me suggest an
analogy: say that we wanted to have an IETF in an area that had
a lot of hurricanes. Now, the likelihood of a hurricane is not
something we can control--I don't expect to negotiate with 
national law--but the extent to which it effects the IETF is
at least partly within the hotel's control. So, one could imagine
a number of clauses about what happens in the event of a hurricane
in which the hotel becomes unusable:

- The event is cancelled and lose all our money.
- The event is cancelled but the hotel refunds a prorated portion
  of our money.
- The event is cancelled but the hotel pays a large indemnity
  (thus allowing us to have a replacement event).

Note that we can't get rid of the risk of hurricanes, but we can
control who bears that risk. 

Now, this isn't a perfect analogy, since in the case of an IETF
meeting, we do have limited control of the risk of the meeting being
cancelled (though the IETF's control of it is really extremely
limited, since they have such limited control over their members) and
since the hotel's control over the situation is probably more limited
here--but whether they unilaterally cancel the meeting at any hint of
wrongdoing is likely to be in their control. However, I think the
basic point remains: this contract seems to make the host and the IETF
bear a large amount of risk which could be shifted to others.  It's
not at all clear to me that that point can't be negotiated with the
hotel. Why would that be dictated by the Chinese government?

-Ekr
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