Comment by WarOnPrivacy
9 days ago
> End-of-life contracts: cloud-vendors should contractually spell out what happens if they can't afford to keep the servers running.
I'm trying to imagine how this would be enforced when a company shutters and it's principals walk away.
Putting stuff in escrow is usually the way to go: escrow service is paid upfront (say, always for the next 3 months), and that's the time you've got to pull out your data.
My company does that with a few small vendors we've got for the source code we depend on.
It's a good question--I am not a lawyer.
But that's the point of contracts, right? When a company shuts down, the contracts become part of the liabilities. E.g., if the contract says "you must pay each customer $1000 if we shut down" then the customers become creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding. It doesn't guarantee that they get all (or any) money, but their interests are negotiated by the bankruptcy judge.
Similarly, I can imagine a contract that says, "if the company shuts down, all our software becomes open source." Again, this would be managed by a bankruptcy judge who would mandate a release instead of allowing the creditors to gain the IP.
Another possibility is for the company to create a legal trust that is funded to keep the servers running (at a minimal level) for some specified amount of time.
No, not at all.
The entire point of Chapter 11 (and similar bankruptcy legislation internationally) is to allow companies to get out of contracts, so that they can restructure the business to hopefully continue on as a going concern.
> When a company shuts down, the contracts become part of the liabilities.
The asset in the contract is their customer's data; it is becoming stale by the minute. It could be residing in debtor-owned hardware and/or in data centers that are no longer getting their bills paid.
It takes time to get a trustee assigned and I think we need an immediate response - like same day. (NAL but prep'd 7s & 13s)
(cont. thinking...) One possibility. A 3rd party manages a continually updating data escrow. It'd add some expense and complexity to the going concern.