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What are automated contracts and what are they used for?

There are different approaches to ease the reuse of data, be it by researchers or “autonomous” applications. One aspect of this reuse are legal questions, e.g. license terms. Some of these approaches work by automation of such contracts.

Licenses & Data usage agreements

Both a “license” and a data usage agreement are contracts. According to the (german) jurisdiction such contracts can be entered into by machines.

In the end a contract is an agreement between two humans. As such it needs a declaration of intent. But the declaration of the machine is accounted to the human using it, for example because they added relevant legal metadata.1 Consequently, a contract can be entered into purely based on legal metadata, based e.g. on the ODRL standard2.

Contributors

Constantin Breß ORCID icon

(Last Update: 2025-09-25)

How to cite this page?

Breß, C. (2025). Automated Contracts. FARagro Knowledge Base. https://knowledgebase.fairagro.net/en/legal/automated_contracts. Under: CC BY 4.0.

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  1. Steinrötter/Stamenov, in: SWK Legal Tech, 1. Aufl. 2023, Smart Contracts, Rn. 11; Christ/Stoppelmann, in: SWK Legal Tech, 1. Aufl. 2023, Vertragsschluss, Rn. 15-19. ↩

  2. The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a policy expression language that provides a flexible and interoperable information model, vocabulary, and encoding mechanisms for representing statements about the usage of content and services. ↩