On Sun, 4 Nov 2018, Edward Murphy wrote:
> > Perhaps Rule 869 should be amended to state that any people continue to be
> > people in perpetuity even if they stop meeting the definition of a person.
>
> We've previously defined classes non-biological persons (contracts and
> such), and then had a specific instance cease to exist while the class
> was still defined. I don't remember this issue coming up then (but I
> might be forgetting something), and those were situations where we
> specifically expected to knowingly encounter the issue at some point.
When we had the R101 Rights, there were some rights that "persons" had.
Then when "persons" were (later) defined to include some contracts, there
was some hoo-hah that we couldn't regulate those contracts in certain ways
(including destroying them) without violating their R101 rights - even
if the contract would "terminate" itself via its own text, there was some
opinion that honoring the contract's "suicide" would deprive it of its
defined rights.
So then we added a clause to the beginning of R101 that said "even if the
rest of the rules define contracts as persons, for the purpose of R101,
only biological-entities-that-could-communicate count". So that meant
dying would take a person's R101 rights away.
