===============================  CFJ 3583  ===============================

      ais523 is a player.

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Caller:                        V.J. Rada

Judge:                         nichdel
Judgement:                     FALSE

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History:

Called by V.J. Rada:                              25 Oct 2017 07:18:12
Assigned to nichdel:                              25 Oct 2017 22:56:59
Judged FALSE by nichdel:                          28 Oct 2017 00:37:15

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Caller's Arguments

I direct the judge to CFJ 3455. It is undisputed that ais523 never
consented to becoming a player and if e is so, e is only so by
ratification.

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Judge's Arguments

The smaller part of this debate is whether the person in question was
ratified into being a player. R869, quoted below, makes this impossible.
The larger issue is consent.

Consent is a concept that must be held in the highest regard in both
Agora and the real world. The rules of Agora have recently enshrined a
definition of consent which seems fairly close to the common sense
definition:

Rule 2519/0 (Power=3)
Consent

      A person gives consent (syn. consents) to an action when e, acting
as emself,
      publicly states that e agrees to the action. This agreement may be
implied,
      but only if it is reasonably clear from context that the person
wanted the
      agreement to take place.

Implicit in this definition, and core to my understanding of consent, is
that there must be a specific instance that can be pointed to as the
moment of consent, regardless of if it is explicit or implicit. This
introduces an entirely new standard to tests of consent in general and
registration in specific, but I will attempt to show that this standard
is consistent with previous cases and current rules.

R869/40 'How to Join and Leave Agora' includes the following lines:

      The Rules CANNOT otherwise bind a person to abide by any agreement
without that
      person's willful consent.

and

      The Rules CANNOT compel non-players to act without their express
or reasonably
      implied consent.

The modifiers 'express', 'reasonably implied', and 'willful' all appear
to exclude the possibility of 'consent by silence'. Thus, consent must
be something a person espouses, though not necessarily directly.

Registration is the primary place of debate for questions of ambiguity
and intent. Since registration is synonymous with consent to the rules,
these questions are questions of consent. For some examples of these,
refer to CFJs 3444, 3450, 3474, and 3501 for recent examples. Many, many
more older examples also exist. All of these point to a single moment
that could be construed as consent, and attempt to disambiguate it.

Of note is CFJ 3558, wherein a person sent an ambiguous message before
acting as if e were a player. In this CFJ, the judge found the behavior
that followed the 'registration' as sufficient to show consent. The same
player who judged that case has recently used the term 'pattern of
behavior resembling consent' to argue this case's merits. In retrospect,
this is a worrying line of argumentation. It is unreasonable to believe
that an interaction with an entity (in this case, a person interacting
with Agora) implies consent to all interactions with that entity, or any
particular set of interactions. Additionally, this appears to be a more
specific instance of 'consent by silence', which does not appear to be
allowed by the rules. While the finding of 3558 is now fixed, it may be
in Agora's best interest to disregard the arguments therein. Instead,
note that there was indeed a single debated instance of consent, and
that the person who sent it appeared to believe it constituted consent
by eir own commentary and immediate actions.

In the case at hand, and all future cases, we should apply the standard
of an 'instance of consent'. This instance need not be explicit, but it
cannot be silent; there should be a single instance reasonable Agorans
can point to that establishes consent.

In this case, such an instance does not exist, as evidenced by the
resulting confusion about not only if, but when and how the person at
hand became a player.

Thus, I judge CFJ 3583, "ais523 is a player", false.

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