Ontological Issues in Agent Ownership 1 ( Reasoning About Agent Ownership )

Ownership is a common concept underlying many social activities – buying, selling, renting and giving etc. For a software agent to operate in an open environment like Agentcities, it may be necessary for it to reason about ownership. This paper provides a brief overview of ownership issues for computer agents and an approach towards a coherent ontological framework for reasoning about agent ownership. Introduction A software agent is usually considered to be an autonomous computer process entity acting on the user’s behalf. However, a software agent is not a legal person under the law, so it does not have the legal capacity to take on responsibility like a human agent and existing business agency law cannot be directly applied to software agents. The common opinion of legal professionals is that an active software agent is to be treated purely as a tool – property owned by an owner. For future software agents to operate legally (as pseudo agents) under the existing legal system, we would like to give the agents the ability to reason about ownership, so that when an agent makes a deal with another software agent it is able to express the ownership of the objects involved, e.g. the buyer may want to verify that the seller really owns the object. In the following sections we give a brief overview of ownership and exercising ownership in a multiagent environment, present an ontological framework with elements of a concrete ownership ontology, and discuss how it provides a basis for reasoning about ownership. A brief overview of Ownership In this paper, we concentrate on the Anglo-American legal system. In such systems, ownership is a relationship between a legal person (individual, group, corporation, or government) and an object. The object of concern may be corporeal, such as furniture, or completely the creature of law, such as a patent, copyright, or annuity. The most basic meaning of ownership is that one’s government or society will help to exclude others from the use or enjoyment of one’s possession without one’s consent, which may be withheld except at a price. [EB] 1 In “LEA 2003: The Law and Electronic Agents”, Proceedings of the 2 LEA Workshop, University of Edinburgh, UK, 24 June 2003, pp. 113-126 2 We have in mind proposals such as those from EU Agentcities.RTD project IST-2000-28385