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Legal Issues in Grid and Cloud computing

The jurisdiction of cross border Service Level Agreements

The jurisdiction of cross border B2B Service Level Agreements

Intellectual property Rights

Contractual issues

Taxes

Legal issues in SLAs

E-negotiations from the legal point of view

Legal content of Service level agreements in grid and cloud computing

Service Level Agreements – the applicable law (1)

Service Level Agreements – the applicable law (2)


The jurisdiction of cross border Service Level Agreements

SLA: issues of jurisdiction (I)

Question: in case of B2C SLA, what if there is no clause about jurisdiction and the competent judge? How is it possible to assess which court will be competent?

The jurisdiction of cross border B2B Service Level Agreements

Issues of jurisdiction (II)

Question: what in case of B2B SLA?

Intellectual Property Rights

Grid and Cloud computing service provisioning is a nascent market. As a result, the tension between the interests of one entrepreneur (individual profit from licensing his or her intellectual property rights) and the industry as a whole (rapid dissemination and free use of the technology through the adoption of open standards) will greatly affect the future development in the market. The principal IPR considerations are set out below.

Contractual issues

The contractual issues that the various actors in Grid and Cloud computing have to face are potentially enormous and endless, considering the spectrum of contracts and the variety of existing applicable national laws. Instead, here we focus on those contracts that, according to the practice so far developed within business law, are more popular and worthy of study, particularly on the international scale.

Taxes

The terms Grid computing and Cloud computing are ones of the most widely used nowadays in the ICT business sector, and many international big players, like Sun, Amazon, etc (not to mention all the other research labs, supercomputing centres and undertakings all around the world) are involved in that. Grid or Cloud computing may appear to be mysterious for the absolute majority of non-experts, but it is expected to become familiar to many tax consultants that deal with IT companies. Some of the most interesting and urgent issues that European businesses operating in a Grid or Cloud environment have to face regard Value Added Tax (VAT) and income taxes.

Legal issues in SLAs

Service level agreements are effectively legal contracts between partners. This produces a number of questions regarding validity, jurisdiction and the imposition of precedents in contract law. Research carried out by the BEinGRID project led to an analysis from a legal perspective of the following questions:

Question: to what extent e-negotiation mechanisms are legally valid and acceptable? Is there the risk that the contract will be declared invalid or void?

Question: is it possible to expect that the content of SLA(s) in a Grid environment is different from those entered into in a non-Grid environment?

Question: in case of B2B SLA, which law will govern the contract and will be applicable to the contractual obligations arising from the SLA?

Question: what about in case of B2C SLA?

Question: in case of B2C SLA, what if there is no clause about jurisdiction and the competent judge? How is it possible to assess which court will be competent?

Question: what in case of B2B SLA?