tegwick
11f2dc3a6d
Executes all remaining shared jurisdictions across both workplans: Germany/EU (deepened contract-law angle), US (deepened), UK (deepened), Argentina, India, China, Africa (South Africa + OHADA), and Asia-Pacific (Singapore, Japan, Australia) - 13 new history/ research artifacts. Highest-priority findings: - Australia's Unfair Contract Terms regime (expanded Nov 2023) covers standard-form contracts with any business under 100 employees/$10M turnover by default - the CUA is exactly such a contract, and most realistic Customers fall within this threshold. Unlike every other jurisdiction's consumer carve-out, this is not an edge case. - China requires a "foreign-related" contract even to select foreign governing law, subject to a vague public-interest override even then - confirms a dedicated China rider is needed for both the License/CUA and the Enforcement Partner Agreement, not a shared global clause. - India flatly prohibits advocate contingency fees (no exception gates, stricter than Germany) while explicitly permitting third-party litigation funding - the cleanest confirmation yet that the Litigation Funder/Local Counsel split-role model is both necessary and legal there. - Japan's Article 12 fee-splitting rule means even the split-role fallback needs jurisdiction-specific structuring - the first case where the workaround itself, not just the original mechanism, has an open compliance question. - Contingency Share ceilings vary widely where available: UK 50% (exact match), South Africa 25%, Argentina 35% (50% only with risk assumption), China 18% down to 6% on a sliding scale that shrinks as claims grow. - Recurring cross-jurisdictional pattern (Germany, EU, US via CCPA, Argentina): B2B governing-law/liability clauses are respected, but an individual/sole-proprietor Customer's consumer-protection status is the operative risk everywhere, not a one-off edge case. Updates specs/EnforcementNetworkConcept.md §8.1 with a full 12-jurisdiction findings table and three cross-cutting conclusions. Updates both V1C1 documents' Appendix A items (governing law, liability cap, data protection) with the most consequential findings. Both workplans now have only their human-gated synthesis tasks (T09-T10 / T10) remaining. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
4 KiB
TRSL Jurisdiction Research: Asia-Pacific (Singapore, Japan, Australia)
Document status: Research artifact, Stage 0 (workplans/TREV-WP-0004-global-jurisdiction-research.md T08)
Not legal advice. Findings drawn from web research (searched 2026-07-29).
1. Australia: the expanded Unfair Contract Terms regime applies directly and materially to the CUA
Australia's Unfair Contract Terms (UCT) regime under the Australian Consumer Law was significantly expanded effective 9 November 2023: it now prohibits unfair terms in standard form contracts with both consumers and small businesses, removed the prior monetary contract-value threshold entirely, and expanded the small-business definition to any business with fewer than 100 employees or under $10 million turnover in the prior year. Courts can now impose substantial per-term penalties, and remedies can include refunds, return of property, or provision of services.
Direct implication — this is the single most consequential finding in the entire WP-0004 program so far: specs/TargetRevenueCommercialUseAgreement-V1C1.md is, by its own repeated description in this research program, a standard form contract, and the great majority of realistic Customers (independent developers, small product companies — exactly the PRD's own named stakeholders) will fall within Australia's expanded small-business threshold. This means Australia's UCT regime is not a remote or edge-case risk the way some other jurisdictions' consumer-protection carve-outs have been (Rome I, CCPA, Ley 24.240) — it applies by default to the ordinary, expected case of a small commercial Customer in Australia, with real monetary penalties attached. Every CUA clause that could be characterized as unfair (the liability cap's proportionality, the audit rights' scope, the termination provisions) should be reviewed against this regime specifically before any Australian small-business Customer is onboarded, not treated as a generic "check per deployment" item.
2. Singapore and Japan: data-protection regimes referenced but not researched in depth this pass
This research pass focused its search budget on Australia's UCT finding (§1) given its unusually direct and material relevance, and on workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md T08's contingency-fee question (see history/260729-TREN-Jurisdiction-AsiaPacific.md). Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) are both referenced in the original task description as relevant data-protection regimes for CUA §11, but neither was researched in depth in this pass — this is a gap, not a low-risk finding, and should not be read as "nothing to worry about" for either regime.
3. Summary for the WP-0004 feasibility matrix (T10)
| Question | Australia | Singapore | Japan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard-form/small-business unfair-terms exposure | High and direct — expanded UCT regime (Nov 2023) covers most realistic CUA Customers by default, with real penalties | Not researched in this pass | Not researched in this pass |
| Data protection regime | Not separately researched (beyond the UCT finding) | PDPA — referenced, not researched | APPI — referenced, not researched |
| Foreign governing-law/venue enforceability | Not researched | Not researched | Not researched |
4. Open items for T10 synthesis
- Highest priority for any future pass: review
specs/TargetRevenueCommercialUseAgreement-V1C1.mdclause-by-clause against Australia's UCT "unfairness" factors (the reforms echo, and go further than, the UK's UCTA and Germany's Transparenzgebot patterns already found in this program — worth treating as a third data point in that same convergent-drafting-recommendation family, perhistory/260729-TRSL-Jurisdiction-UK-Deepened.md§2). - Singapore PDPA and Japan APPI both need dedicated research passes before CUA §11 can address them specifically.
- Foreign governing-law/venue enforceability in Singapore, Japan, and Australia was not researched in this pass at all.