Smart contracts, (blockchains, distributed ledgers) and rights management broadly construed are the themes of today's Spotlight Patents. Assigned to the inventor Jana Sukkarieh, the first patent addresses techniques for creating and using a transparent, computable contractual natural language. Assigned to DLT Global, the second patent addresses a parent/child model for smart contracts enables the smart contracts to be updateable without compromising the immutability of the underlying data.
11573968, “Systems and methods of creating and using a transparent, computable contractual natural language,” assigned to Jana Sukkarieh.
Abstract
System and methods of creating and using a transparent, computable contractual natural language are disclosed in which a set of legal contracts are text mined to obtain a structured contractual database. A set of categorized contractual phrases are assembled from the structured contractual database. A transparent knowledge representation language is defined having a set of syntax rules, a set of semantic rules and a set of inference rules. A transparent, computable contractual natural language is the set of contractual phrases that map to the transparent knowledge representation language. A user writes computable legal documents comprised of phrases contained in the transparent, computable contractual natural language.
11575518, “Updateable smart contracts,” assigned to DLT Global Inc. (CA)
Abstract
A parent/child model for smart contracts enables the smart contracts to be updateable without compromising the immutability of the underlying data. As a first step, a parent smart contract (Client Contract) is deployed that stores any other contract that may be called using the contract address. Then, whenever a new child smart contract (Service Contract) is deployed, the parent smart contract is updated with the address of the new child smart contract so that the parent smart contract will be able to call the child smart contract. The structure of the child smart contract is known to the parent smart contract. For example, the number of inputs going into the child smart contract and the number of outputs coming out of the child smart contract are known to the parent smart contract before deployment of the parent smart contract, and the transaction data remains accessible without affecting the parent contract.
